The Terror

When Wayne Coyne opened The Flaming Lips’ 2004 Coachella set by crowd-surfing in a giant inflatible bubble, it represented more than just another gimmick to add to the band’s ever-increasing arsenal of theatrical parlour tricks. It effectively split the Flaming Lips into two bands. On the one hand, you have the merry pranksters that have remained a constant in music-new feeds for the past decade, whether they’re doing rails with Ke$ha, beefing with Erykah Badu, or taking the concept of a physical album release to literal extremes. And then the other, you have a band that, over the past few years, has entered the most fiercely experimental, stridently anti-pop phase of its long and storied career. It’s just that the former aspect inevitably overshadows the latter-- even on the tours for 2009’s dark, disorienting Embryonic, volcanic salvos like “Worm Mountain” and “See the Leaves” simply got subsumed into the Lips’ usual onstage circus and became the backing soundtrack to more bunny-costume dances.

But with The Terror, the Lips take the bold step of bursting their own bubble. The band’s unrelentlingly bleak new album relates to its predecessor much as Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots did to The Soft Bulletin, retaining its antecedent’s weighty mood but deconstructing the instrumental bombast into more skeletal, mechanical forms. For all its claustrophobic tension, Embryonic still offered much in the way of thunderous rock catharsis; The Terror presents no such salve, drowning its meditative, melancholic melodies in a suffocating, smoggy haze of buzzing synth frequencies, with little rhythmic release. The first song may be called “Look… The Sun is Rising”, but it’s less cheery proclamation than grave warning, its stuttering drum beat and dentist-drill shocks conjuring ominous images of a not-too-distant future where the mere act of going outside will require the use of a gas mask and protective suit.

Tellingly, The Terror has resulted in a complete rethink of the Lips’ stage spectacle, one designed to disorient rather than delight. Last month at South by Southwest, the band previewed the album in its entirety at Austin’s Auditorium Shores with a set-up that deemphasized Coyne’s usual carnival-barker cheerleading in favour of an all-out video-screen sensory assault (and random acts of hair-pulling), the singer held in place by a custom-made synthesizer molded into a baby doll sprouting massive tentacles that extended to the stage’s backdrop. Naturally, a set of unfamiliar, unremittingly gloomy material didn’t make for ideal Friday-night entertainment for many of the 30,000 in attendance, but Coyne’s static position onstage is a fitting visual metaphor for his performance on the record.

Where Embryonic played on themes of environmental destruction, The Terror deals in more personal turmoil-- loneliness, depression, anxiety. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the album was preceded by news of Coyne’s separation from his partner of 25 years, Michelle, and of multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd relapsing temporarily.) Accordingly, Coyne spends the record singing like someone who’s strapped to a hospital bed, often resorting to a cautious sing-speak or fragile falsetto as if too beaten down to muster up the strength for anything more. (Or maybe it’s a vocal-eroding side effect of being the most chatty, gregarious frontman in rock.) Even when unleashing an invective like “You’ve got a lot of nerve/ A lot of nerve to fuck with me,” his voice remains eerily emotionless, relying on duet partner du jour Sarah Barthel of Phantogram to give the line extra bite.

In light of Coyne’s more muted presence here, the real drama on The Terror stems from the way in which the Lips layer their tones and drones into heady, hypnotic surges. The Terror may be the Flaming Lips' most demanding album to date, but it’s also the most sonically of a piece, immediately thrusting you into its dense miasma and seamlessly dissolving one track into one another; in the transition from the despairing “You Are Alone” into the spectacular percussive procession “Butterfly, How Long It Takes to Die”, you hear the same quiet-to-clamor fluidity that Liars mastered on Drum’s Not Dead. And from the desolate post-apocalyptic atmosphere, some powerfully affecting moments emerge, like “Try to Explain”, a beautifully bruised break-up ballad that romanticizes the past while defeatedly acknowledging that things will never be the same.

But if The Terror presents a distillation and refinement of ideas initially explored on their post-Embryonic interim releases-- like last year’s Heady Fwends collaborations and their infamous hours-long jams-- it still feels underdeveloped in spots. At 13 minutes, centerpiece track “You Lust” is the longest song to appear on a proper Lips record since the 1980s, and a companion piece to Embryonic’s “Powerless”, using a coolly repetitive organ refrain as the foundation for an agitated, free-form synth freakout. But its imposing grandeur is diffused by an intrusive, creepily whispered chorus incantation and a drifting, protracted denouement that lingers for far too long. And in the wake of the absorbing, slow-roiling intensity of the penultimate “Turning Violent”, the closing “Always There... In Our Heart” (a bookend echo of “Look… The Sun Is Rising”) doesn’t quite deliver the blown-out grand finale its repeated 1-2-3-4 build-ups suggest, instead simmering down before reaching full blast. (Seemingly aware of this anti-climax, the band tack on the incongruently cheery Hyundai-ad jingle “Sun Blows Up Today” and an Edward Sharpe-assisted cover of "All You Need Is Love" as bonus tracks, a move that feels not unlike appending a gag outtakes reel to a film’s closing credits.) But even if it doesn’t consistently exhilarate to the same extent as the band’s most totemic works, The Terror is nonetheless a significant work in their voluminous canon: By matching their ever-evolving, exploratory musical ethos with less eager-to-please, more confrontational modes of performance, the album marks the moment when the Flaming Lips become whole again.