The Flaming Lips. The Worlds Most Frustrating Band?

I guess it depends what level of fan you are. Luckily, the most essential stuff is readily available (albeit in very unforgiving sound quality). I'm including the 15 studio albums and the debut EP, and the "major" side projects starting with Dark Side. Basically, what's available on CD.

I certainly would like to own the music from the gummy 2011 releases. But I don't want to spend $250 on something you literally need to destroy in order to get to the music, which is probably going to be way too experimental for my tastes.

I applaud the band for daring to experiment and be bold with their releases - sometimes weird for the sake of weird, sometimes a bit more reasonable - and yes, it certainly is frustrating to have so much of the catalog (proportionally by length!) withheld by these gimmicky things. On the other hand, as a collector, I've found a way to be satisfied with the stuff out on CD and yet still have the thought in my mind "If one of those comes up for cheap, I can still get more new music."

I will say that the inclusion of the rarities disc on the recent greatest hits CD set was a very welcome addition and hopefully future volumes will include more "unobtainable" stuff.

 

I too like the rarities stuff on the new 'Greatest Hits'. Have just purchased the 'Scratching The Door' compilation and find it to be a great listen also.

Have seen a Ltd edition version of 'Embryonic ' online for a great price: Faux fur lined outer box, plus the album as high resolution 24 bit on DVD alongside the cd. It appears the DVD is in regular DVD video format not DVD-A. Can anyone confirm if this is or isn't the case?

My blu Ray player does SACD but not DVD -A hi res layer decoding.

 

AND, the Imagene Peise record I mentioned earlier.

 

What don't you like about that one? They lost me for a few years when Yoshimi came out but they won me over again with The Terror (I've gone back and warmed to Embryonic too), but I'd count Oczy as one of my favourites of their albums. It doesn't sound like Clouds, sure, but to me it sounds like some weird audio fairytale - a weird little world where I'm able to lose myself for a while. Not the strongest songs, perhaps, but the atmosphere is great.

 

I guess you could say they've stripped away all of the elements of The Flaming Lips that I love(d), leaving behind only this atmosphere. There's no thunderous Steven Drozd drums; there's no weirdo/freaky guitar; the compositions are not very intricate or at least well-written; it's very inorganic and synthy; Wayne's concept seems to me to be inauthentic.

I just relistened to The Terror, and I can see how they ended up at Oczy Mlody, but at least The Terror had much of the aforementioned FLips attributes as well as this new cold atmosphere, and was the very last gasp of the Wayne we used to know. All that's left is this Plastic Fantastic Wayne which I don't buy, not care for.

 

The Sgt. Pepper album is quite good - don't listen to the detractors.

Did they expect it to be a conservative, traditional version of the album? That's just silly.

 

I agree with most of that. I thought the vibe of The Terror was fine, but the songs just didn't come together enough for me. Shoot, I still saw them on that tour, and they only played a few songs from it, so it's almost like they knew right away that it wasn't that good.

 

I stopped listening to them at Zaireka. Got to gimicky with that and the puppet shows, parking garage experiments, etc. I still can't listen to anything after Clouds.

 

I love The Terror. It's 90% atmosphere and 10% music, which normally I would dislike, but I just love the atmosphere so much. The lyrics are really clumsy when you actually read them, but when you can actually understand them in the songs (admittedly that's about 20% of the time), they just work. I think "Look, The Sun Is Rising" is my favorite Lips tune overall. No clue why, but the only other song that I like as much is "The Spark That Bled", and this one evokes something that "Spark" doesn't.

That said, if you don't like the atmosphere, or the atmosphere doesn't "click" with you, I can see disliking the album. "Try To Explain" is probably the "serious" song on the album, and the lyrics are complete nonsense. "Try then walking away on a bridge to nowhere." Sure thing, Wayne. And idea-wise, they really kind of blew their wad on the first three songs; starting from "You Lust", the ideas can get really stale and I often find myself switching to something else in the middle of that one.

 

I get what you're saying, but there's hardly any of those thunderous drums on Yoshimi either, while that also has no weirdo/freaky guitar bursts and plenty of synths - same with The Soft Bulletin too. I guess I don't see this album as that different from those two albums, only it's been mixed with the atmosphere of the Terror. Mind you, it peaks near the end with two genuinely affecting songs in The Castle and We a Family; without them the album would be just a sprawling mess, but with them it has a sense of direction and purpose. I guess that makes all the difference to me.

 

This is not exactly correct. There is lots of guitar on both Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi (Steven's typical fingerpicked "jazzy" clean guitar), and I hear Steven at least attempting to fill Ronald's shoes on both (although this is more apparent on At War With the Mystics and Embryonic). Yoshimi is primarily based upon hours upon hours of drum samples of Steven, taken from drum tests (and some fans have postulated Wayne had Dave simply record all of this for future use just in case Steven was unable to do it because of his heroin addiction at the time). Just as well, the synths of Soft Bulletin are quite different than on Oczy, as the Soft Bulletin synths were meant to replicate actual orchestral instruments and are slightly detuned to replicate human imperfection. That is not the sound of the Oczy synths.

It's OK that you like Oczy. I'm not going to criticize your opinions for it. But I laid out my specific reasons for disliking Oczy, it would be futile to argue my own opinions on it. I hope you are not getting defensive because I don't like something you like.

 

Just purchased the Sgt Pepper vinyl in NM condition for £10. Haven't played it yet so can't comment on its sound quality. Love the artwork and translucent orange LP though.

 

I get frustrated by them, with all the gimmicks, but I really do think their last few albums are excellent.

 

Nah, I'm not getting defensive - I'm just yakking about the Lips! I was just stating why I like Oczy - because I don't see it as that different from The Soft Bulletin or Yoshimi when compared to what they were doing before those albums.

 

Curious. Is the 24 hour song any good ?

 

I was reading this thread and I found that giveaway from Bull Moose

 

Yes, lots of good stuff in there and lots of great abridged versions floating around out there (one previously mentioned up thread).

As far as the band goes, I'm a huge fan, but can understand people's frustrations with obtaining many of the releases or otherwise. A lot of them were expensive, along with limited in availability.

I just happened to be at a point where I could afford and had the time to track a lot of that stuff down when it was originally released. So barring a few of the more really expensive items (7Skies H3 skull, Blood filled version of Heady Fwends, Beer filled 7") I have most of the other things - part of thrill was the chase.

 

Honestly, I'm good with my signed copy (reissue on orange wax) of Clouds Taste Metallic.

 

I've got a bad, bad feeling that I'm going to become a completist for this band. The 24-hour skull is definitely cost-prohibitive, and (at the moment) I'm going to draw the line at owning another person's remains, BUT I did luck into a lossless version of the entire track (just the 16-bit version, fine by me), and what I was able to hear before my computer crashed was really, really intoxicating. I managed to split it into 18 80-minute WAV files, hopefully those will be easier for my computer to handle.

As the "Future Heart" videos on YouTube don't sound like needledrops, do any of you know if the vinyl EPs from 2011 came with download cards?

 

Like most a fan from the soft bulletin era, and consider that lp and yoshimi modern classics
Have pretty much all the CDs and most of the vinyl, and really enjoy the dark side cover lp, and I enjoy their wacky releases but not enough to track them down for silly money .
Kinda fun they do something different

 

I saw The Flaming Lips at Glastonbury, must have been 15 years or so ago - I'm pretty sure R.E.M played the same day.

I remember it being a bizarre experience, they seemed to be wandering around the stage with huge foam hands on, waving at the crowd. I'm 90% sure I'm not hallucinating this image...

Love The Soft Bulletin but not much else, I think I came to them via Mercury Rev's Deserters Songs, as there was an inter-band link somewhere.

 

I like the fact that the feel free to indulge themselves in the way they do but as the gimmick releases have become more elaborate, they've been deleterious to the whole. They've been on a downward slide since Yoshimi, arrested only by "The Terror" which was a great album but kinda mislabelled given that only Coyne and Drozd appear on it (maybe that's normal now, I dunno).

Also, Coyne steady slide into general douchebaggery - beginning with the firing of Kliph - has been unhelpful.

 

You're not. Coyne wore giant Hulk fists that he painted pink to look flesh coloured. I guess, from a distance, that would have been a bit disconcerting.

 

I am sure that this may have already been said but I think the Lips are pretty much two projects. There are the core albums, many of which continue to be excellent. Oczy Mlody was a treat. Then there are the various more experimental offshoots which you can choose to take or leave but which are tangential to their main career. The only one of these I actually have is Dark Side of the Moon but I do think that is terrific and fits right in with their core albums. However I don't feel the need to follow them down every rabbit hole.

The answer to the Zaireeka conundrum, if you have the available technology, is to combine all four discs using Audacity. They synchronize easily and the final result makes for satisfying listening which does not require the plate spinning skills of the original project.

They remain the greatest live act I have (repeatedly) seen. Their UK shows in support of Oczy Mlody were wonderful.

 

How do you combine the 4 discs using Audacity?