On their first studio album in four years, The Flaming Lips have crafted a desolate dystopia built around the emptiness of life without love. The premise seems far removed from the authors of ‘Do You Realize??’, but you’d never count on Wayne Coyne and his troops to stick to a familiar script.
The album opens with ‘Look… The Sun is Rising’, which builds into a heaving mechanical metropolis, with pummeling drums underpinning an eerily catchy synth line, while Coyne ponders “look, the sun is rising/ what will love us now?” Pretty dim stuff.
Coyne has suggested that the album’s bleak tone was born from hearing multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd’s initial skeleton of ‘You Are Alone’. Stemming from Drozd’s brief relapse with heroin, the soundscapes are matched in their dreariness by Coyne’s reveries on life bereft of love. Separating from Michelle Martin, his partner of 25 years would certainly leave a hole, and at 52, the fear of ever finding love again would lead to some pretty severe bouts of loneliness.
You certainly feel that sense of isolation in the vast, desolate krautrock expanse of ‘You Lust’. The 13 minute album centerpiece sounds a lot like the world you’d envision if Yoshimi failed to battle the Pink Robots; with mechanical walls of synth and robotic rhythms slowly sweeping across endless barren terrain.
It’s not an easy listen by any means, but underneath the dense synth-smog there are fleeting moments of beauty.
The meandering bass during ‘Be Free, A Way’, the strings of ‘Try to Explain’, or the curious propulsion of ‘Butterfly, How Long it Takes to Die’ all reinforce that even in this bleak desert, there is still life.
Despite Coyne’s desolate introspection, he leaves the album with the final line “always there in our hearts / a joy of life that overwhelms.”
Love Classic Rock?
Get the latest Classic Rock news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more
The real surprise about The Terror is not its dystopic mood, but its remarkable cohesion.
Considering the endless scatter-shot, headline-grabbing additions to the band’s CV (24 hour songs, record-breaking gigs, gummy-vaginal packaging and collaborative albums), since their last studio album Embryonic, it’s amazing that the band have been able to craft what is possibly their most unified album to date.
Peripheral fans will lament the stark mood and the absence of a festival worthy singalong, but devoted ‘Lips listeners should find The Terror a challenging and rewarding album.
Even if it is a bummer.
