THE FLAMING LIPS

Oklahoma’s oddest offer a surreal allegory, with spoken word.

It’s not every day you hear Clash legend Mick Jones narrating a trippy, sinister fairy tale about a giant baby as Wayne Coyne sings, ‘I could see my mother as she died’, but King’s Mouth isn’t your run-of-the-mill rock album. The 15th Flaming Lips opus (and bumptious use of the word “opus” is justified in this case) features 12 tracks, punctuated by Jones’ geezer-ish tones reciting its central cosmic fable. The music and its myth tie in with Coyne’s art installation, which tours US museums. This involves a huge metallic head which invites spectators into its foam mouth, wherein this music plays to a psychedelic light show. Coyne’s conceived it from a similar place of childlike wonder as the band’s memorably visual live shows. It’s a long way from punk rock, and closest in spirit to the Zappa/Beefheart mad-genius zone of prog.

Setting context aside, the music seems to start tentatively, relying too much on the Lips’ penchant for helium-voiced nursery rhymes and Space Age keyboard wibbles, and one worries it’s going to veer towards irritating. However as the album builds, true drama ensues, sounds coalesce and cohere, and the last two-thirds are enthralling. The vivacity of Electric Fire, the witty invention of Feedaloodum Beedle Dot and the grandeur of Mouth Of The King are everything Flaming Lips do best. Like their peak albums The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, this marries perky wide-eyed optimism with heft and gravitas. You’d never skip the first 15 minutes of a film, but somehow King’s Mouth feels more powerful if you jump past its trying-too-hard, overfriendly opening.

Jones is having a cult-favourite summer, what with this and a track idolising him on the new Waterboys album. His narration here, however, also takes a little getting used to. Perhaps to Americans the cockney accent sounds like a thing of mystery and wonder. To us Brits the match-up here is incongruous, as if a “seedy underworld” gangster from an

80s Bob Hoskyns film has turned up to talk on a Mercury

Rev album, compromising the dream-pop vibe and grounding things more than is ideal. Coyne’s script is truly bizarre, like a Donald Barthelme postmodern story painted by Dorothea Tanning, and Jones never sounds completely comfortable. One cocks an ear when he begins Giant Baby with ‘the giant noodle’, only to grasp on repeat that he’s saying ‘the giant new-born’.

It’s the band’s laudable leap into something different and fresh which causes such provocations and pitfalls however. This challenges, even startles. Flaming Lips’ oral fixations make for aural fascination.

A LAUDABLE LEAP INTO SOMETHING DIFFERENT

AND FRESH.