by Gianluigi Marsibilio (@GMarsibilio)
The Flaming Lips are a crossroad, a meeting of arts, sounds and sensations that combine the past, the present but also the future. To prove it there is the new King's Mouth, already released early as a limited edition for Record Store Day. The album is a continuation of a flow that expresses itself in a myriad of artistic bonds built by Wayne Coyne and his visual and musical universe.
Behind their album there is the ability of a mind that imagines and describes in a kinematic and surreal way. The pieces are snapshots of a chaos that smells strongly avant-garde, even more than three decades after the debut of the band. The instrumental and cyber-tribal interludes in the album are part of a village that, idealistically, The Flaming Lips have been building for fifteen records.
Listening to Coyne and his thoughts scattered throughout the works is like diving into a seventeen-hour game of No Man's Sky. There is, in the lyrics and in the story told in an incredibly linear way by the disc, the youthful propulsion of "Rocket Ship Galileo," one of the first novels by Robert Heinlein: curious to understand the paths that led Flaming Lips back to a storytelling so universe-centric.
The words, vowels and phrases in a piece like "Giant Baby" are perfect for celebrating the 50th anniversary of man on the Moon: everything is cosmically analog, the Apollo era and the construction of a vintage but effective sound road. Flaming Lips don't play with their own stereotypes, but they are still able to build new "doors of perception" in every outlet of the record.
"How Many Times" is a shining example of a pioneering attitude on the part of Coyne, moving into unexplored territories like David Attenborough. The poster to hang in each square is in all the unbridled creativity that lives through complex sound universes and the reconstruction of spatial landscapes full of dynamism. The disc is a gigantic spiral of Calder, everything is in motion, in a movement that is lost in spaces and territories.
King's Mouth is a picturesque audiobook that adapts to the contemporary universe of graphic novels and comics, but everything is permeated with a childish fantasy, which remains the real strength in the approach to the album. Mick Jones' voice is a touch of surrealism that gives even more value to the narrative power of the album. The record dialogues perfectly with Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and with the collective ego of a band that has written its history in a strongly avant-garde way.
A band like The Flaming Lips is able to create a space composed of an infinite number of horizons, in fact on King's Mouth there is that impetus from Sun Ra, which allows you to "reach every planet in the sky". The album is a new model of storytelling, a shoot the cards on the table, the crasis between your subscription to Audible and Spotify