- - - - - - - -
Current
Issue
Editor's Desk
Write for Pif
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
|
|
| PAST MUSIC REVIEWS | MORE REVIEWS |
Stick It In Your Ear : Page 1, 2, 3, 4
I must pause here to say, "So what?" If the music itself were bad, Zaireeka would be nothing more than a very elaborate cacophonic prank, and this article would be a big theoretical waste of time. But freakishly enough, Zaireeka works. The songs themselves are strangely beautiful. (I know because I melded all 4 CD's onto one stereo cassette tape using my multi-track digital recording equipment.) So even as a regular CD, these arrangements are expansive. On four separate CD's, these arrangements become mind-percolatingly massive. There is very little guitar distortion to hide behind and very few melody lines are doubled. So everything is harmonizing and counter-pointing and intricately inter-playing off its own melodic merit.
It's hard to decide what the main melodies are because they're all so good. Listen to CD #1 alone, and you're certain that the cool bass line is the song's main riff. Listen to the same song on CD #2, and you wonder, "Is this the same song?" Listen to both CD's together, and you're amazed at how tightly two seemingly different melodies can blend. And that's just 2 of the 4 CD's! Coyne's lyrics are ridiculously sublime in an amusing way, as if he were a thoughtful hyper-creative soul dropped in the middle of suburban Oklahoma on the edge of the 21st century and forced to wrestle with all the unanswered questions that his own inexplicable existence generates. Imagine that. But the meat of this project is the tunes.
Zaireeka is one of the most important pieces of music ever recorded. The Flaming Lips won't be listed with the John Cages and Philip Glasses in your textbook of modern composers, nor will they be listed among the Nirvanas and Pearl Jams of pop lore. So where does that leave them? Maybe they'll settle for the "most psychedelic band since the 13th Floor Elevators" title. Nonetheless, Wayne Coyne & Co. are on a mission, and they probably don't care about our lists.
THE BEAUTY THAT GENIUS BECOMES (The Soft Bulletin)
|
While they were recording Zaireeka, the Flaming Lips were simultaneously writing and shelving other songs that seemed too normal for the 4-CD project. What they wound up with was a bin full of great psychedelic pop songs that grew into The Soft Bulletin. My thoughts in a review I wrote upon its release: "At their conception, The Flaming Lips seemed unlikely to craft the Sgt. Pepper's of the 90's, but two decades of relentless experimentation have led them out of their fuzzy schlock-core wilderness and into Strawberry Fields. The Soft Bulletin's sweeping orchestration is as brilliant as George Martin's best, and much weirder. The Beatles cut their teeth on Jerry Lee Lewis and returned to Gilbert and Sullivan. The Flaming Lips cut their teeth on Kiss and have returned to a kind of Bacharachian spaceship lounge soundtrack. Wayne Coyne's naively catchy pop tunes and goofy daydream-plot lyrics remain comfortingly intact, titanically arranged to new levels of faux-profundity. Pure fun psychedelic pop."
|
|
Zaireeka may be more artistically profound, but The Soft Bulletin is the CD that's been in my ear non-stop for the last two months. The tunes are epic in a Carole King "The Porpoise Song" kind of way. They achieve the same level of epic grandeur as the theme songs from You Only Live Twice, Thunderball, and The Man with the Golden Gun. The Soft Bulletin is probably best enjoyed as a rock opera. Its CD packaging suggests its dramatic/filmic nature. However you take it, The Soft Bulletin is surprisingly accessible, albeit very strange.
