By Nolan James
Arts & Culture Editor
Legendary psychedelic rock band The Flaming Lips’ newest album American Head is a flurry of emotions and textures. The album is at once lushly orchestrated and at the same time coldly electronic.
There are two songs which exemplify this. Throughout Assassins of Youth, which is one of the strongest tracks on the album, a fast-paced acoustic riff is constantly galloping throughout, creating one of the more upbeat, catchy melodies on the record.
The succeeding song God and the Policeman, another highlight of the album, is an extreme tonal shift. It immediately begins with an ambient and alien-sounding drone, and the overall sound of the track is much more laid-back and mysterious.
For the most part, however, the songs are all homogeneous. Most tracks individually maintain a melancholic yet warm sound. While there is perhaps more orchestration here than most albums of its genre, American Head does not do anything particularly innovative with its sound. It just does it well.
Sometimes the similarities between the songs are too great, leading to a feeling of repetitiveness. In particular, the chorus for Dinosaurs on the Mountain, with its distant-sounding, robotic, nasally vocals, is far too reminiscent of the preceding track, Flowers of Neptune 6, and far less interesting.
While the songs are mostly vibrant and full of sound, many of the more pleasant moments are laid back. You n Me Sellin’ Weed is a far more stripped-back song than those surrounding it, and one of the highlights of the album. That is not to say the song does not have interesting and detailed instrumentation, because it does, but its texture is far more simple than the songs on either side of it.
Lyricism is not a particular strong-suit of this album. Quite often the lyrics are simply dumb. “Sad, sad, sad, sadness, sadness, sadness, sadness,” goes the chorus of Mother I’ve Taken LSD. Those are not exactly insightful lyrics, to say the least, nor is that song particularly good.
However, at times the simplistic honesty of the lines can be quite effective, as is the case with the song Mother Please Don’t Be Sad. That song, perhaps the strongest on the record, is a heartbreaking and emotional plea and another example of simplicity working in the track’s favor.
While lead singer Wayne Coyne may not be an excellent poet, he is a strong singer, and his vocals consistently serve as a great counterpart to the music. Guest singer Kacey Musgrave similarly provides pleasant vocals to the two tracks she’s featured on.
There is one exception to this, which would be the aforementioned Mother I’ve Taken LSD, in which Coyne’s vocals seem strained to the point where it seems they had to drown out the highest notes with the instruments.
That track is not the worst song on the record, however. The final track, My Religion Is You, is an unfortunate closer, and another example of weaker lyricism. Coyne’s meditations on religion are quite uninteresting and juvenile, and the overall song is bland.
Due to the repetitive nature of the songs, American Head could have benefited from some trimming, but the overall experience is a relaxing trip through drug-inspired psychedelica with some deeper reflections on death and the meaning of life which give the album substance.
