Holding off as well as this in no way is a record I want to stream before I listen. When I get the Indie vinyl next week, I want to sit in my sweet spot and digest it the way it needs to heard, at least for my ears. I absolutely get why people stream first though, just not for me. My limited #500 edition won't arrive for a couple of weeks or so as my son had both copies he ordered shipped to his place so he was able to grab both at the same time before the price went up. The same seller on ebay has one more on there for $189 right now.
I'm no Flaming Lips expert or super fan, but I like several of their albums. Favorites are Soft Bulletin and Hit To Death In The Future Head. I haven't paid much attention to them since Embryonic and I haven't listened to that in years. I will have to revisit it and the albums that followed. They lost me many years ago, but I gave this new one a listen because it looked interesting. I'm mixed on it. I have to give it a few more spins to fully decide, but I'm not crazy about many of the backing vocals. They kill so many of the songs for me. The vocal on "Watching The Lightbulbs Glow" is so unnecessary. Are they still trying to reach some young pop audience or something? Wayne's voice has always struggled, but age isn't helping matters. He still retains some redeeming vocal qualities though. My favorite song is "Mother I've Taken LSD" . That's some classic Flaming Lips right there.
For fun, my proposed "improved" At War With The Mystics. I'm not sure what order I want the tracks to go in, but these are the songs: From the album, drop "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song", "Free Radicals", "Haven't Got A Clue", "The Wizard Turns On" (though that would make a killer B-side) and the first half of "It Overtakes Me" Add the piano version of "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" which is on CD 3 of the greatest hits (I forget the alternate title) This knocks it from around 60 minutes to around 45-50 and cuts out the most annoying bits. Segue "The Stars Are So Big" after something (probably "Vein Of Stars", shuffle "Goin' On" to the end of what would be side one, and find a better sequence. "The WAND" is a great opener, "Pompeii" is a great closer... unfortunately they're linked together. Maybe that could be changed.
Goin' On is the only disposable song on ...Mystics for me. Everything else needs to stay. I didn't like Free Radicals at first, but loved it after seeing it live and how all of those little background vocal parts and whanot were done by the fans; made the song a lot more fun and catchy. And while it's hard to not pick a run from The Soft Bulletin or Yoshimi as their best 3-song run ever, the run of The Sound of Failure, My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion and Vein of Stars is impossible to beat. Everything great about the Lips can be summed up in those 16 1/2 minutes.
took a quick listen to 7skies h3. this one must of slipped by me. very nice album. i will say the main theme which consists of cant shut off my head/main theme/cant let it go) is "Tiger dreams" from the miley cyrus collaboration. I know the lips also rerecorded "the sunrise" from that miley cyrus album and released it as "eyes of the young" on ozcy mlody. I think im going to put away my copies of oczly and kings mouth. I never really listen to them. i think im going to cull my lips collection to bulletin/yoshimi/american head/the terror. Do i really need 10 Lips albums? i think ill just keep what i feel i like the most. basically after hearing american head i see that oczly and kings mouth were like "half efforts" to me.
Agree for the most part, Mystics is such a bizarre tracklist, the goofy songs and more serious ones just do not belong on the same album IMO and I've always thought that cutting Yeah Yeah, Free Radicals and Haven't Got a Clue would vastly improve the cohesion of it. Personally, I would leave The Wizard Turns On and all of Overtakes me, but I like the suggestion of moving The WAND to the opener slot. Even though it's kinda crossfaded with Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung, it actually doesn't sound bad when WAND transitions to Sound of Failure. But there's two cymbal effects and yeah, combining them so that the cymbal only happens once would be killer. It's a 43 minute album if you just cut those three songs and I think that's just about perfect for this material.
I get the feeling these days that every Flips song goes on an album and now they do an album every year, rather than one every four years, alongside 30 b-sides/extra tracks. Nowadays we just get the 30 b-sides as LP tracks and four times as many albums (especially if you include things like Elektric Wurms and Deap Lips)! I enjoyed American Head a lot when listening to it today, but it does feel like one long song....
this thread has me in a Lips spiral, havent listened to them in years. now i have to find all the titles missing from my collection!
I think I'm going to dig out the Fearless Freaks documentary tonighg. I almost forgot I had it - I bought it some time early last year but only played it once. The question is, will I skip the scene where Steven shoots up this time? The answer is... ehh, I'm even more squeamish than I was last time!! I'll look for a transcript of what he says in that scene...
"Goin' On" is a bit of a lightweight number, it's somewhere in between the deep, serious stuff and the jokey obnoxious stuff. It's definitely not the right choice for album closer, though; that would be "Pompeii". I grew to love "Goin' On" because I listened to "The WAND" and "Pompeii" so many times and didn't stop the album afterwards that I just got very familiar with it. Apart from the absurd compression, the production on that song is absolutely perfect. I would love to hear a non-compressed version of that mix (I know Dave Fridmann applies that absurd compression in the mixing process, so it would be impossible to hear a full-dynamics version without a remix). I have tried for two years to get into "Free Radicals", and every time I hear it, I like it less. If they toned down the playfulness, I could keep the full "It Overtakes Me" - I really love that "you know that it isn't real" bit. "Haven't Got A Clue" has just never, ever registered to me; it's just annoying. And I trained myself to like the album version of "Yeah Yeah Yeah" - I thought that there was a fantastic song underneath all the stupidity - and then I heard the piano version (just looked it up, it's called "In Anatropous Reflex"... yeah) and the album version became basically useless to me. "The Wizard Turns On" is really good, but I feel like it wouldn't fit anywhere if the songs I mentioned were removed. This album has so many sore thumbs that this song kinda blends into the background, but if you amputate those, the pure weirdness of this song is made very obvious. I think this song would have made a fantastic B-side from the sessions, one of those instances where you might think "How did this not make the album!?" cases. But I don't think there's a great place to fit it on this revised, less jokey version of the album. And on the current version of the album, it kinda just drifts by. "The WAND", with the ending cymbal crash removed and "The Sound Of Failure" starting up during that ending tone, would be a good way to begin the album; if the (already excellent) segue between it and "Pompeii" must be preserved, "Vein Of Stars" would also make a suitable opener. "In Anatropous Reflex" won't work as an opener; it needs a total powerhouse of a track to follow it, and the only one here that would work is "Pompeii" - the best closer we've got. So that's where I'd put it if "The WAND" opens and "Pompeii" closes; during the tail of the last piano chord, bring in that tone from the end of "The WAND" and let that reversed cymbal take us to the end. Everything else could probably just fall in the same order as the CD - though I might move "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion" toward the end, after "Mr. Ambulance Driver". Would that dwarf the impact of "Anatropous Reflex"? I'll have to do my own edit and try out this sequence. EDIT: Maybe I would have to drop "Goin' On". I can't think of anywhere that song would fit!
well, i'll take your copy of King's Mouth off your hands! after being a huge lips fan and that one being the first one i did not buy in 20 years, hearing this new one has got me thinking i need to fill i some holes and that i need to give it another chance!
I dunno I think Goin On is a great closer personally, a nice minimal, heartfelt number to send people on their way thinking about the past, and the future.
im not going to sell them. just move them in to my closet storage. Maybe someday out of the blue ill want to hear it? its not a bad album but i feel its middle tier lips now.
That’s some of my favorite stuff from Mystics. I guess that we just don’t have the same taste in Lips music.
I've got (I think) 71 Flaming Lips discs of some description. This is counting LPs, CDs, and DVDs, each separately, and including duplicates, of which I have far more than I should. I sold five discs in the past (not counted), have three that I plan to sell (counted), and have two more on the way from Amazon (not counted). Not too shabby. Of course, eight of those discs are my two copies of Zaireeka, six of them are from Seeing The Unseeable, and eleven of them account for my six (!) copies of Embryonic... so it's not a very impressive collection in the grand scheme of things. I agree with the above post: it's not enough! I need more!!!
I’ve got a CD single somewhere (one of the Clouds Taste Metallic singles) that came in a plastic wallet full of green goo.
Your post has prompted me to buy 7Skies H3. I kept seeing it over the years and it’s one of the few I haven’t got. Always wondered about it. PS, I wouldn’t put away The Kings Mouth, great album IMHO.
Great album. Congratulations to the label (Bella Union) on making it f****** impossible to buy the vinyl now unless you pre-ordered, that's great work, definitely the way to do a new album release.
That track genuinely pricked up my ears and got me very interested in what was to come. I'm 49. No idea what you are on about.
Just counted, I’ve got 37 CDs (counting the numbers within). Only one album duplicated and that is TSB as I have the U.K. and US (for The Spider Bite song). Soon to be 38 when 7Skies HS arrives. I also have quite a big Mercury Rev collection (no surprises).
There’s no local distribution for the vinyl or CD here in Australia. It’s like the labels don’t want to actually sell records. This album is gaining a lot of positive attention yet we can’t buy it here.
