The Flaming Lips - The Flaming Lips & Heady Fwends (CD, Double vinyl LP)

Now that the panic-buyers and flippers have been milked on the original RSD press of this album it’s getting a regular release anyway so us mere plebs can finally get our hands on a copy, which is nice because I was starting to think I’d never get one. Anyway, over the last year or two the ‘Lips have been taking advantage of their newfound between-labels status after their deal with Warners expired to get a bit experimental and try new things - massively long pieces contained on memory cards inside gummy skulls, a thorough exploration of their relationship with synths and drum machines, and a seemingly endless string of collaborations with household names as varied as Lightning Bolt, Neon Indian, Prefuse 73, Yoko Ono, Erykah Badu and Nick Cave. This album here on Bella Union compiles those collaborations into a single easily digested slab.

Stylistically things are all over the place here, but my immediate highlights include the beat-infested party smasher ‘2012 (You Must Be Upgraded)’ with Ke$ha, Biz Markie and Hour of the Time Majesty 12; hazy psychedelic head-nodder ‘Children of the Moon’ with Tame Impala which has a great and very Lipsy buzzsaw guitar hook and drifty, swooshy falsetto psych-pop verses; the clattering lo-fi Birthday Party-esque rant of ‘You, Man? Human???’ with Sir Nick of Cave introduces repetitive overblown synthetically distorted guitar to a characteristically Cave-esque stompy aesthetic, with a few weird little harp flourishes offering some disconnected clarity to proceedings.

I’m sure I saw a completely demented video for the Lightning Bolt collab ‘I’m Working At NASA On Acid’ online a while ago but the version on the CD I’m reviewing takes things down a notch for a ‘Space Oddity’-esque bit of drifty psych-pop which goes a bit noisy and mental in a kind of Mae Shi way towards the end, which is confusing. Totally not the song I thought it was going to be though...we’ve also got some Morricone-esque post-techno weirdness on the Neon Indian collab ‘Is David Bowie Dying?’; chilled out alien pop on ‘Ashes In The Air’ with Bon Iver; dirgey, distorted cosmic blisspop with Eryka Badu on a reinvention of Roberta Flack’s ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’...there’s a lot to take in here and it’ll take a few listens to really sink in but it’s clear the Flaming Lips are as creative and forward-thinking as they’ve ever been and this collection is a delightful peek into what’s next for the world’s best-loved psych scamps.