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Album of the week:
The Flaming Lips - "American Head"
Do you want to create a collection of the strangest concept albums in pop history?
No problem, just start with the Flaming Lips.
The psychedelic rock band, founded in 1983 in Oklahoma City, has spent the past 20 years re-recording classics such as "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (with Miley Cyrus) and "Dark Side Of The Moon" (with Henry Rollins) to turn through a kind of noise meat grinder.
One of her most successful albums to date, the electronic-experimental, anime film-inspired "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots" (2002) was in part about a little Japanese girl who is fighting against her cancer.
It was adapted as a musical.
Visitors to Flaming Lips concerts like to come in self-made fantasy costumes and marvel at the stage excesses of the tousled (some say: confused) headed singer, songwriter and all-round artist Wayne Coyne, who also likes to use silver little fetuses as Christmas tree decorations designs.
In short: The Flaming Lips are one of the most musically versatile and visionary rock bands of the last 25 years - but they are definitely also one of the
weirdest
.
Andreas Borcholte's playlist
Photo:
Christian O. Bruch / laif
The Flaming Lips:
Will You Return / When You Come Down
Clara Hill:
Spiral Wind & Clouds
Preach:
Like
New Order:
Be a Rebel
Bruce Springsteen:
Letter to You
Black Heino:
Checkmate
Haiku Hands:
Car Crash
Suzanne Vega:
Walk on the Wild Side
Leolixl:
Maybe in love
James Blake:
Godspeed
Go to Spotify playlist Right arrow Go to Apple Music playlist Right arrow
The latest work by Coyne and his musical mastermind Steven Drozd also initially follows an insanely amusing concept.
From a documentary about the late All-American rock star Tom Petty, he learned that Petty made a stopover in Tulsa, Oklahoma for a secret session in the early 1970s, on his first major PR trip to LA - in the neighborhood where he was at the time Teenagers Coyne - in the middle of nowhere in America.
Coyne was intrigued: What if Petty had got caught up in the clutches of his drug-dealing older brothers and their biker friends and had never left Oklahoma?
Maybe he would have simply dreamed away on Quaaludes and LSD,
running down a dream
,
so to speak,
and would have recorded an album that sounds like "American Head".
Coyne and Drozd call it the most quintessentially American album they have ever recorded.
It's also one of their best in a long time, at least since "Yoshimi", maybe even since the perennial high point "The Soft Bulletin", which came out in 1999.
Of course, there is no gripping heartland rock to be heard from the Flaming Lips, but wonderfully ethereal and enraptured power ballads gliding on brightly glittering synthesizer sounds and pearling piano, in which Coyne with a melancholy voice about weed, the criminal, rebellious brothers, deceased friends and relatives meditated: Why was it he who survived?
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The Flaming Lips
American Head
Label: Pias / Bella Union (Rough Trade)
Label: Pias / Bella Union (Rough Trade)
approx € 16.56
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11.09.2020 2.32 p.m.
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The result is a kind of "Ballad of Easy Rider" update with big melodies and epic stories, such as when Coyne remembers watching dinosaur-shaped clouds as children and wondering whether they would go to heaven if they died high .
In "Mother, Please Don't Be Sad", his version of "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" filtered through the Beatles, Byrds and Beach Boys, he describes how he once lived in a fish-and-chip joint , where he worked, got a gun to his head in a robbery and thought it was over.
Perhaps that was the "softest bullet ever shot" that Coyne sang about 20 years ago in "The Spark That Bled" even more cryptically than it is today, an artistic spark, born of violence, chemically induced escapism and teenage fear.
How scary, how American!
We get up and say,
yeah
.
(9.0)
Briefly listened to:
Suzanne Vega - "An Evening of New York Songs & Stories"
Perhaps exactly what the city ravaged by Corona now needs for consolation: Suzanne Vega, an eternally underrated muse of Manhattan, gathers songs and stories that are longing for in this intimate live concert from the old bohemian café Carlyle on the Upper East Side New York is circling: hits like "Luka" as well as rarities and Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side".
(7.9)
Haiku Hands - "Haiku Hands"
"You're like a wonderful car accident, baby, I just can't look away": for such song lines you just have to love the female trio Haiku Hands (you think: Tic Tac Toe from Australia)!
On their debut, the three even sometimes throttle the dance pop pressure known from their empowerment singles "Not About You" and "Manbitch" for ballad-like nuances.
Funny.
(7.0)
Marilyn Manson - "We Are Chaos"
The only shocking thing about the former "shock rocker" Marilyn Manson is his incredibly bad music: How should one call the depressing bombastic ghost train feasting that Manson does in songs like "We Are Chaos" or "Paint You With My Love": Industrial -Bat?
In his own words: "sick, fucked up and complicated".
(1.0)
Paul Epworth - "Voyager"
He wrote "Skyfall" for Adele and produced Coldplay, Bloc Party and U2: Paul Epworth has shaped British pop music for the last 20 years, now he's giving himself his first (concept) album for his 50th birthday - a space trip that Rap stars like Vince Staples and Ty Dolla $ ign beamed to Sun Ra, Sci-Fi Soundtracks and Pink Floyd.
How do you say?
Ambitious.
(5.0)