at a glance...

Hometown: Oklahoma City, OK
Year Formed: 1984

Members:
Wayne Coyne -guitar, vocals
Michael Ivins -bass, vocals
Ronald Jones -guitar, vocals
Steven Drodz -drums, vocals

Bands In The Family:
Mercury Rev, Those Bastard Souls

Notes:
Wayne Coyne started The Flaming Lips with his older brother Mark in 1984, with Mark soon departing. They released a serious of demented, off-kilter psychedelic pop albums with excessively long titles. In 1991 they signed with Warner Brothers and released several demented, off-kilter psychedelic pop albums with slightly shorter titles. In 1994 "She Don't Use Jelly" somehow landed them in the Top 40, all over MTV and on "Beverly Hills 90210." The insanity of Clouds Taste Metallic saw the Lips recede back into obscurity, a position consolidated by the release of Zaireeka, an album recorded in four-part sound which required four stereos and allowed for on-the-fly mixing by the listener. Two years later, the band returned with the ambitious, orchestral The Soft Bulletin, this time all on one CD.

The blues had a baby, and called it rock n' roll. Then it took lots of drugs, bought some bitchin' equipment, lost Jesus, and became Wayne Coyne. Wayne started the Lips and kept the band going because he's the fucked-up son of the blues, but he got 'em signed to a major label because he is very very ambitious. This album, their second for Warner Bros., is a big fat debutante ball for Wayne and his ambition; it makes the Flaming Lips sound like the future of American rock music, which of course they've turned out to be.

From the beginning of this wacked-out extravaganza to its reluctant end, Transmissions... has more great songs than anyone ever thought they would come up with; sure, the Lips always provided a blistering sonic assault of weirdness, but the profusion of superb material here suggests some kind of Robert Johnson-like deal with the devil was made. "Turn It On" has my vote for one of the top five greatest album-opening mission statements of all time; Wayne, backed by Bugs Bunny money, tells all the messed-up garage bands in the world to "keep the hope alive!" and keep doing programs on local cable-access stations (you know, with all the "trippy" Video 101 effects), but still manages to sound really sincere. We've got "Pilot Can at the Queer of God," THE song to have running through your head if you happen to have a crush on a lesbian who now has access to helicopter-based firepower. We've got "Be My Head," which is just about the coolest song the Archies ever recorded. And of course there's "She Don't Use Jelly," which I never really liked when it came out, but a whole lot of other people did, including the gang at the Peach Pit After Dark when the Lips did 90210.

Of course Wayne and Michael had been playing together for a long time, but it's the two brand-new members that really blow Transmissions into the huge balloon of beauty that it is. Ronald Jones is the Eddie Hazel of the 90's, a strange man with a talent for hurting guitars in the most interesting ways, and destined to make only a couple of really great albums before vanishing into the ether. Ron and Wayne's abrasive electric noises are matched in ferocity by Steven Drozd's drumming, a distinctive whomp that has come to mean "Flaming Lips" as much as screwed-up song titles do. It's completely inconceivable that this tight band, a Godzilla in ballet shoes really, just came together, giving further credence to my Robert Johnson theory. Well, shit, if it works this well, I might look into myself. Do you think Satan has a toll-free number?

If you like The Flaming Lips, check out:
The Flaming Lips Hit To Death In The Future Head
The Flaming Lips Clouds Taste Metallic
The Flaming Lips In A Priest Driven Ambulance
The Flaming Lips The Soft Bulletin
The Flaming Lips Zaireeka
Mercury Rev Boces
Neil Young Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
The Thirteenth Floor Elevators The Best of...
Funkadelic Maggot Brain
The Boo Radleys Everything's Alright Forever

-- Matt Cibula