Album Review: The Flaming Lips - The Terror

The Terror. The unrelentingly bleak new album from The Flaming Lips shouldn't come as a surprise. Wayne Coyne and his minions have made a history out of focusing on one element from a previous album and making it whole – we see the psych rock therapy of Embryonic manifest from the kaleidoscopic At War With The Mystics; the hypercolour warped pop of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots wormed its way out of the more elegiac musings of The Soft Bulletin. And whilst in between Embryonic and The Terror there is a myriad of parlour-trick tours and explorations of format, throwing inhibitions and boundaries to the edges of the earth, the nine tracks here are a true growth from the platform of their last album's efforts – in fact, this is an album's album; cohesive in almost every aspect.

That's not to say The Terror is genius – far from it. Yet the swathes of synth screens the personal focus of the record – Coyne's apprehensive fear of becoming inert, isolated, unloved, losing all creativity and therefore the will to live. As such, these songs cannot exist on their own legs – the ominous, gargantuan kraut crawl of You Lust, the glitch beats and ethereal hues of Be Free, A Way, even the stadium-as-futurist drive of closer, Always There, In Our Hearts – none of them fit as a packaged soundbite. The point is – as singles they are isolated, as a whole they are a breathing, heaving mass. Those looking for a candy-coated LSD injection should look elsewhere.

So too should anyone seeking an album of melodic substance. The Terror is admirable, sonically spectacular, and aurally sleek – yet the appeal dies away after time.