Album Review: The Flaming Lips, King's Mouth

The Flaming Lips have released records which needed four CD players to listen to, or were sold only on USBs encased in brain- shaped sweets. But even by these standards, their latest is odd.

Accompanying an art exhibition by frontman Wayne Coyne, and featuring narration from The Clash’s Mick Jones, King’s Mouth tells the story of a giant king who dies for his kingdom. Somehow, however, his severed head lives on, dipped in steel to become an observation deck for visitors.

The concept album is part Tangerine Dream-like cinematic compositions, part the digital folk-pop and psychedelic rock for which The Flaming Lips are known. The tracks that resemble film scores don’t always grip as much as the more traditional songs. That said, compositions like ‘Electric Fire’, boasting angelic choral voices, twangy guitars fed through a synthesiser and a climactic cacophony of disorientating reverb, or the bass and drum heavy ‘Feedaloodum Beatle Dot’, do sound dynamic and exciting.

The more typical tracks strangely find the group at their most sincere. There’s something of the melancholy of ‘Do You Realize??’ in delicate lullaby ‘Giant Baby’. Meanwhile, anthemic closer ‘How Can A Head??’, concludes the record’s strange story, while also serving as a beautiful ode to the human form: “How can a head/ hold so many things/ all our life, all our love/ all the songs it sings.”

King’s Mouth is The Flaming Lips’s most cohesive work in ages, benefitting from a concept as absurd as the band themselves.

Out now.