The Flaming Lips

1984-1990 (Restless)
by Jon Sarre

Long before they were hailed as art-rock auteurs by fanzine writers everywhere, Wayne and Kevin Coyne et al’s The Flaming Lips were, for lack of a better description, studio rats running into a series of dead-ends whilst on a quest for focus (which, oddly enough, appeared to ’em in the form of Warner’s A&M department’s willingness to bankroll any implausible project Wayne Coyne wants to embark upon, no matter how difficult it is to sit thru, cuz who knows, maybe they’ll be another “Vaseline” – was that song called that? – in there somewhere. Sheesh! The way they chuck the money out the window, is anyone really surprised Time/Warner got bought by AOL?). It’s the false starts, represented as building blocks in the tinker toy palace of Coyne’s mind, that the Accidental Career… concerns itself with.

Some of the attempts at emulating bands more popular than the Lips (which seemed to take up a lot of their time) get pretty interesting. 1984’s “Bag Full of Thought,” for example, with its trippy Cramp-isms lead a few years later, somehow, to the noise rock approximations of Phil Spector on “Chrome Plated Suitcase” (tho’ Wayne Coyne tags Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’Mine” as the prime inspiration for that number). The band’s droney psychedelic/stoner/lousy Pink Floyd period, represented here by “Jesus Shootin’ Heroin” and “One Million, Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning,” veers off, perhaps logically, into full-on Sonic Youth homages like “God Walks Among Us Now” and a gritty cover of “Death Valley ’69.” Additional tribute tracks included here, possibly to save the consumer the effort of tracking down and then paying too much for a SubPop Single of the Month, or having to purchase The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young (thanks!), are the Lips’ oddball medley of the Sonics’ “Strychnine” and Nick Lowe/Elvis Costello’s “Peace, Love and Understanding,” as well as Young’s “After the Goldrush” and Zeppelin’s “Thank You,” the latter recorded in front of an audience that seems enthusiastically inclined to classic rock (the exact reason they did stuff like that, according to Coyne). If that was the case, perhaps what The Flaming Lips coulda sussed from their first fifteen years of bandom, was that finding new and exciting ways to rip off Roger Waters was the way to go.
(www.restless.com)