yoshimi battles the pink robots flaming lips zip

Ambulance Driver” on 2006’s At War with the Mystics. The Lips have always flirted with the dark side of stuff - with a grin, with a whiff of ironic detachment, with an almost youthful dismissal - for their entire careers, from the giant, dick-riding skeleton on the cover of 1987’s Hear it is to the plaintive siren wails of “Mr. The Death of Everything and by the last sounds of The Terror you’re not going to be sure if the good guys will pull off this one or not. The party has turned itself into an appropriately psychedelic funeral dirge fired into the heart of the sun.

Coyne is as much an ambient instrument here as anything else Steven Drozd or Michael Ivins (or Kliph Spurlock or Derek Brown, jusy to get the whole lineup in there) can whip up: even Drozd’s falsetto takes on a castrato’s asthmatic panic underneath it all. Moments of hope poke out here and there like anxious little sprouts - the glorious chorus of “Try to Explain” can hang in the rafters with any of the Lips’ best moments, for example - but then is followed with a sad dismissal packed inside of Coyne’s ghostly drone-echo: “Try to explain/ Why you’ve changed/ I don’t think I’ll understand… Try to explain/ Why you’re leaving…” At least I think that’s what he’s saying. The boys sound like they have a lot on their minds: titles like “You Lust,” “You Are Alone,” “Turning Violent,” and “Butterfly, How Long It Takes to Die” betray only that the fright without matches the fright within. “Finally the punks have taken acid” indeed - but it’s ended real, real bad. Loops and shrieks and beats transform The Terror into a giant, swooning symphony of unrest and anxiety.

That grit of sand that crept into Wayne Coyne’s voice a few years ago has spread over the whole affair now a pearly hum coats every sonic wave and audio landscape on this record as it unfurls, frequently conjoined by seamless segues, one moment into the next. There’s a paranoiac buzz over The Terror like a hummingbird’s wings. Finally, something to keep the second side of Abbey Road uneasy company on your iPod, only this time we’ll take nothing with us in the end. A nervous, buzzing, seething sweep of a record less about songs and more about movements, maybe, The Terror finds the still Oklahoma City-based Lips pushing further and further away from three-minute bytes of radio-friendly units of data (because, really, what the fuck does that even mean anymore?) and deeper into territory found on discs like 1997’s Zaireeka and 2009’s Embryonic. The nervous breakdown that’s bubbled just under the surface of the Flaming Lips’ output since 1999’s The Soft Bulletin has arrived, fully formed, at long last, on The Terror.

Yoshimi battles the pink robots flaming lips zip