The best way to understand The Terror is to completely disassociate yourself from the band you know responsible for She Don’t Use Jelly or even Do You Realize? This is a band that for years after the commercial success of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots is continuing to find reasons to exist, both musically and existentially.
It helps that Wayne Coyne pretty much has creative carte blanche in the music industry and even his most far out ideas are hailed as genius without question – Zaireeka anyone? – This has always been the band’s biggest blessing and curse, their most dysfunctional and inaccessible concepts crave editing, yet this is exactly what makes a song like Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell so brilliantly original.
Look…The Sun Is Rising opens unceremoniously, the glitches hint at the distorted and dark sunrise represented on the album cover, a forethought to the rest of the album, one that is preoccupied with the darkness pervading everything in life. Immediately, the tone of the album is far different from the playful political commentary of something like The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song. It’s clear Wayne has more harrowing things on his mind, describing Be Free, A Way as a song filled with “a lot of existential dread and realism.”
But it is their ability to sonically explain these motifs that makes The Terror such an amazing journey. Their hi-fi electronica and emotion imbued brand of rock music crunches with angst, there is no feel-good crescendo because these are not pop songs, for Wayne they are binoculars into the soul and the vulnerability of the human condition. The 13-minute voyage, You Lust has more emotion in it than a John Cusack film and there is a real feeling, especially on the stunning title track that this is the sound of Wayne Coyne putting everything on the line, not just experimenting but communicating, in the most honest and visceral way he ever has on record.
Originality is a word that defines The Flaming Lips – though Fight Test always sounded like Cat Stevens – and the only thing that matches this album’s originality is its density and complexity. Comparing the album to Soft Bulletin may be a redundant exercise better left to bands such as the Foo Fighters; but if A Spoonful Weighs A Ton sounded like the optimism of having your entire life ahead of you 14 years ago, welcome to your comedown, it’s name is The Terror.
BY CHRISTOPHER LEWIS
Best Track: You Lust
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: Strung Out In Heaven BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE
In A Word: Despairing
