![]() Even on the closest thing to an “album” to come out during that time, the collaborative project The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends, there was a limited edition vinyl that came packaged with freaking blood samples from the various artists who sang and played with them on the record. They released music on flash drives embedded in gummi candy with disturbing shapes. They created a six-hour-long song, and then a twenty-four-hour-long follow-up. The ensuing years saw a flurry of releases from the band that seemed deliberately designed to sabotage our very notion of acceptable formats for music. Still, I can’t get into the album as a whole, and I felt like it was the first sign of the band going off the deep end (forgetting, of course, that they’d already made several laps to the deep end and back before I was even out of high school). Amidst the long and tedious meandering experiments that I don’t really care for are some interesting and intentionally overblown rock jams, and some solid grooves that do their darndest to make dissonance catchy. Looking back, I appreciate the ambition behind that album now, as well as the desire to make sure fans knew they hadn’t gone soft. I found myself at odds with the critics once again when, in 2009, the band apparently threw the sensitive indie pop playbook out the window and created the dark, sprawling, genre-hopping double disc Embryonic, which got a lot of raves, but which I personally couldn’t stand. At War with the Mystics apparently got slagged by a lot of folks for being more of the same, though that remains my personal favorite Lips album – to me it just pulled their whole bag of tricks together into more of a complete package than I’d heard from them in my admittedly limited experience with the band. You didn’t need four stereos to listen to those albums or anything. They still had a lot on their minds, and weren’t dumbing anything down, as far as I could tell – they had just become more accessible. Somewhere along the way, they went from bizarro space-rock masterminds with an unlikely oddball radio hit, to indie pop luminaries, thanks to the success of The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, two albums which got the band a lot of press for their sudden “maturity”. Shoot, one could argue that the Lips have had this as their goal since day one – though it’s only since about the turn of the century that they might have even been remotely considered mainstream. It was almost 20 years ago when U2, accepting a Grammy Award for Zooropa, the most bizarre and experimental album of their career, promised us “We will continue to abuse our position and f*** up the mainstream.” Whether you’re relieved or disappointed that they abandoned this goal right around the turn of the century is a discussion for another day, I suppose, but if U2 has dropped that ball, there’s probably no better band to pick it up than The Flaming Lips. Just approach with caution if you’re not in an emotionally stable place. It has just the right mix of clutter and harmony and escapism.In Brief: The Terror has some intriguing gems buried deep in its nightmarish soundscapes. Well, heck, “Bad Days” is pretty much a song you will love. But if you have an open mind, if you like stomping beats, ringing chimes, splashy drums, bouncy bass parts, fuzzy guitars, choruses you can sing along with, lyrics that are easy to remember. It’s like the ultimate in lazy, grumpy teenaged yelping. Coyne’s (purposefully) awkward vocal approach. Our bad days go away, our concerns evaporate.Īnd the sound! The sound, my friends. ![]() We can travel planets, we can do anything. “You have to sleep late when you can, and all your bad days will end.” Dreams, the escape from what we have to the fantasy world where we can not only be what we want to be, but where we don’t even have to be limited to that. “You’re sorta stuck where you are / but in your dreams, you can buy expensive cars or live on Mars / and have it your way.” Who among us doesn’t dream of having it our way, every once in a while? It’s quirky and universal at the same time. ![]() And “Bad Days” is such a happy, upbeat, celebratory song of sleeping, breaking out of the grind and doing what you want to do within the safety of dreams. We all have those “take this job and shove it” moments. I think that describes Emily’s and my antics fairly well! ![]() It is daffy, it is hilarious, it is human. And sometimes this song almost feels like a soundtrack to that. Sometimes Emily and I can get a bit goofy, we’ll babble to ourselves or at each other. These are the discussions Emily and I have had.īut put on “Bad Days,” and all is forgiven. ![]()
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