The album’s title comes from the song, “At the Movies on Quaaludes,” which while self-explanatory finds the young Coyne dreamily reflecting on his chances of living the American Dream, becoming rich and famous if they can “ever get out alive.” Turns out, the adolescent Coyne at the heart of these songs spends a fair amount of time on drugs imagining far away planets while “Watching the Lightbugs Glow,” wondering about the dinosaurs and God and death. All appearances aside, they’re just a really good band.Ĭoyne, longtime co-producer David Fridmann, and the boys in the band have their bag of tricks to produce the hippy trippy sound that has come to define Lips’ music, but throughout the 13 tracks of American Head you can always hear the strummed guitar or gently played piano chords that keep the band’s feet securely rooted on solid ground. The band’s songs, beneath all the sonic kaleidoscopes of thunder and wonder, are at their core solid pop songcraft with enough theremin misdirection and bursts of synthetic orchestrations to draw attention from the band behind the curtain that skillfully provides the solid underpinning that holds everything else together.
the Alien Babes’ concert wars, and stunning visual theatrics of the Flaming Lips’ live shows, it turns out that Coyne is a balladeer at heart. That may be one of the secrets behind the Lips’ 35-plus year career that underneath all the psychedelic synths, Santas vs. Described as a reflection on singer Wayne Coyne’s youthful upbringing in Oklahoma City, The Flaming Lips’ 16th album, American Head steps away from the bombastic sci-fi rock opera visions of 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and last year’s King’s Mouth to make a record of more reflective, often tender ballads akin to 1999’s The Soft Bulletin.
0 kommentar(er)
