A look at The Flaming Lips' transitional 1995 album

Everyone loves The Flaming Lips.  Hell, my mom actually bought Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots before I got around to it.  Unfortunately, it seems that no one cares about any music made before The Soft Bulletin by Oklahoma's only psychedelic space prog rock band.  Sure, they all have a downloaded copy of She Don't Use Jelly and talk about how cool the idea for Zaireeka is, but do they really own any albums other than The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi?  No.  Do they really care?  No.  And that's a damn shame.

Back in the day, before Ronald Jones departed from the Lips and they succumbed to more spacey (and strange) tendencies, they were Oklahoma's only psychedelic noise pop/rock band.  They didn't have the urge to make movies about Christmas on Mars and didn't put on shows involving men in hamster balls.  Now, I'm not going to lie and say that I don't like these things, but I must admit that I am disturbed by the fact that people hardly care about classic Lips.  There was a time when their version of psychedelic music was closer to Pet Sounds than it was to Dark Side of the Moon, ya know.

Clouds Taste Metallic is the easiest stepping stone from modern-day Lips to the Lips of yesteryear.  It was the last album to feature Ronald Jones as guitarist, who gave them a deliciously skuzzy sounding guitar on top of their psychedelic pop melodies.  Lightning Strikes the Postman best exemplifies this, a track so noisy that it enables one to understand why Sonic Youth is on tour with the Lips (and perhaps makes one wonder why Asobi Seksu isn't).  Kim's Watermelon Gun also features a prominent use of noise, but is more influenced by punk than it is by shoegaze.

These shoegaze and noise influences were much more pronounced in the Lips' early career, and they find themselves present, if toned down, on Clouds.  In their place is some experimenting in the area of psychedelic music.  They had been psychedelic in the past, but this album brought them even closer to the psychedelic feel that so many fans know the Lips to have today.

This familiar, noise-less psychedelic sound can be seen (if in a somewhat less practiced fashion) on Placebo Headwound and Brainville, which feature about as much noise as any track off of Pink Moon.  Album highlight This Here Giraffe also sees minimal use of noise, favoring instead a catchy bassline, some subtle guitars, and Wayne's vocals while he sings about "this here giraffe."  Yes, it is ridiculous, but what do you expect from an album with song titles like Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles, Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World, and the aforementioned Kim's Watermelon Gun?  And yes, pretty much every song is Snakes on a Plane-esque: the title gives the whole thing away.

Unlike their other albums, however, every song off of Clouds Taste Metallic wasn't written while the Lips were on a good trip.  Evil Will Prevail and Bad Days, the final two songs on the album, not only show The Flaming Lips being unhappy, but also happen to be pretty awful.  They make attempts at acoustic melodies, but it seems that Wayne realized halfway through that that's not how the Flaming Lips roll.  They both pick up around the two minute mark, finishing at much better places than where they started.  Just don't believe anybody who tells you that it's a metaphor for the Lips' career.

Release Date: September 1995
Artist Website: www.flaminglips.com
Label: Warner Bros.

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