The Flaming Lips

Seeing The Unseeable: The Complete Studio Recordings 1986-1990

waRneR MusiC You want a tripped-out voyage of musical discovery? Then start here. Six CDs of remastered acid-fuelled dementia.

Six CDs of delightfully hallucinogenic heavy-monster rock songs with titles like Jesus Doin’ Heroin and One Million Billionth Of A Millisecond On A Sunday Morning that out-crazy the Brian Johnson Massacre and out-trip Spacemen 3. Six CDs that collate Oklahoma’s Flaming Lips’ adventures into sonic death with independent label Restless in the late 1980s – long before Wayne Coyne and co. turned into a giant hamster-ball version of R.E.M. and inspired Miley to get her cock out.

Complete studio recordings? That’s doubtful, knowing the outpouring – some may term it a vomiting – of creativity that Flaming Lips are capable of in the studio. But there’s still more than enough here to keep even mega-fan Bobby Gillespie quiet. For a while.

The great moments are mostly in part four: a remastering of 1990’s tumultuous, Jesus-obsessed, Velvets-esque In A Priest Driven Ambulance. Listen to What A Wonderful World reinvented as a full-on White Rabbit trip! Wonder at the twisted soliloquies and distorted mighty crunch of single Unconsciously Screamin’! Prepare for full immersion!

Elsewhere it’s possible to trace a direct link between the

wah-wah cat-call of Sub Pop seven-inch Drug Machine In Heaven and Unplugged from the 1986 debut album Hear It Is to the psychic experiments happening at the time (Soundgarden, Das Damen, Sonic Youth) and early Lips’ spiritual heirs the psych rockers of Australia 2018 (Tame Impala, Pond, King Gizzard). Explosive, corrosive and…

The Flaming Lips peaked a few years after these recordings, with the acid bubblegum pop of 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic. For energy and sheer derangement, however, look no further.

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