Album Review: The Flaming Lips - The Terror

Recently The Flaming Lips have celebrated the image of life bursting from the womb, from their live shows where the band seemingly emerge from between spread legs to the cover of Embryonic which suggests some kind of strange alien birthing process. The Terror, on the other hand, is a concept album that sounds more like Wayne Coyne and the rest of the band retreating and curling up into a foetal position.

It is something that few would have anticipated after the rather jovial collabs of Heady Fwends or the bad acid psych of Embryonic. Setting the controls to the heart of a distinctly negative space, this moody atmospheric album hangs in the air like thick fog. Mostly, Coyne deploys a drifting falsetto that takes us so high that it's hard not to feel just a little vertiginous. The band arrange themselves around him with strangely mechanical and repetitious synthetic sounds to create intense atmospheres that shift from being suffocatingly bleak into more hauntingly bittersweet melancholia.

Coyne sounds like the survivor of an attack on Earth by aliens on Look... The Sun Is Rising, which feels nauseous yet hopeful. Sounding remorseful, Try To Explain dissects a failed relationship with sobering intensity that suggests that the emotions here are sincere and real. Referencing Pink Floyd's Young Lust, You Lust launches with the quotable line “You've got a lot of nerve to fuck with me” before descending into freaked out ritualistic noise that further devolves into a thick sludge of entrancing but intense ambient noise. The title track provides light relief as it drifts like clouds in the sky. A dreamy trip of an album that finds the Lips exploring their more introspective side.