The Terror
The Flaming Lips' unrelenting new album retains Embryonic's weighty mood but deconstructs the instrumental bombast into skeletal, mechanical forms. Where its 2009 antecedent played on themes of environmental destruction, The Terror deals in personal turmoil-- loneliness, depression, and anxiety.
After four years of gummy skulls, re-created prog-rock classics, and experiments in listener endurance, a truly vital LP is the most surprising commodity The Flaming Lips could bring to market. After all, so much of the band’s prolific post-Embryonic output has gone toward proving the mustiness of the mass-produced,…
It’s the Flaming Lips at their most preoccupied with nothing other than music, and it sounds wholly weird, but great.
The Terror represents a tighter focusing of the atmospheric psychedelia of 2009's Embryonic (and, to an extent, their multi-collaborative Heady Fwends compilation from last year). Wayne Coyne's voice, effect-laden and in high-register throughout, provides a familiar, soothing backdrop to the crescendo-building, buzzsaw guitar and syncopated beats of Look...The Sun is Rising and Always There In Our Hearts, which bookend the record.
“There’s a little spaceship/Hiding in the clouds/You want it to love you/Its peaceful voice is loud.” The opening line of The Terror could describe The Flaming Lips themselves as they prepare to land with an unsettling new mission.
The Flaming Lips' 13th album is a comedown after the band's many highs, writes <strong>Kitty Empire</strong>
The Flaming Lips’ understated 13th album, The Terror, paints a bleak, post-apocalyptic future.
Review Of The Flaming Lips "The Terror" The band’s latest LP opens with ‘Look..The Sun Is Rising’ which in cinema terms sonically, is a real curtain raiser.
Wayne Coyne and friends return to their experimental roots – with knobs on, writes <strong>Dave Simpson</strong>