Flaming lips soft bulletin about atomic war

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 canвЂ™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 theyвЂ™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 donвЂ™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 hadnвЂ™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 couldnвЂ™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 вЂ“ to me it just pulled their whole bag of tricks together into more of a complete package than IвЂ™d heard from them in my admittedly limited experience with the band. You didnвЂ™t need four stereos to listen to those albums or anything. They still had a lot on their minds, and werenвЂ™t dumbing anything down, as far as I could tell вЂ“ 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 вЂњmaturityвЂќ. Shoot, one could argue that the Lips have had this as their goal since day one вЂ“ though itвЂ™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 вЂњWe will continue to abuse our position and f*** up the mainstream.вЂќ Whether youвЂ™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, thereвЂ™s probably no better band to pick it up than The Flaming Lips. Just approach with caution if youвЂ™re not in an emotionally stable place. In Brief: The TerrorВ has some intriguing gems buried deep in its nightmarish soundscapes.

Flaming lips soft bulletin about atomic war