The Flaming Lips have a back catalogue which stretches back to the time when people's idea of music was strumming a mandolin aimlessly and wearing puffy sleeves and grey wigs. Yep, that's right. The Eighties.

Horrible as the decade may have been, the Lips are one of the many bands which made records during this time which were neither annoyingly 'sparse' electro or annoyingly 'crap' heavy metal. There is some debate, however, as to whether or not any of the albums they made were any good, but I can say that by the time they reached the 90s they were good indeed.

Jonathan Donnahue of Mercury Rev was once a Flaming Lip, and the two bands have a great deal in common. The heart of The Flaming Lips is a distorted pyschedelia, and their mid-90s albums, contrary to popular critical belief, sound nothing like Sonic Youth. Instead they sound like fuzz-guitar versions of music from a Disney Film. A secret, drugged-up Disney film, maybe, with a weird sort of sad-sweetness to them.
 

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Clouds Taste Metallic (1995, Warner)
On the back of the sleeve it has a picture, of some extremely weird clouds that look like furrows in a field; above it is written 'These clouds are real!!'. Somehow this seems to symbolise the childlike sense of wonder at just, like, stuff which permeates the work of the Flaming Lips. This is no exception, and in many ways it's the blueprint for 'The Soft Bulletin', only this was when they still had a lead guitarist and thus it's run through with distortion.

There's a sort of lo-fi exuberance here, too; 'Kim's Watermelon Gun' and 'Lightning Strikes the Postman' are blasts of sweetened feedback and guitar noise. 'Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World' is like a B-movie sci-fi comic book set to music, with a dischordant riff an vocal backing waving somewhere between the 50s and the 60s.

There are times when the innocence does get a bit cloying; 'This Here Giraffe' is just plain annoying, although that might be more to do with the bassline than anything else. But it's rapidly countered by 'Brainville', which comes across like a melancholy optimist in a theme park.

Not as slickly-produced as 'The Soft Bulletin', and probably not quite as good, 'Clouds Taste Metallic' is still a great piece of frazzled toyland pyschedellia.

#LINKS#
Official Flaming Lips
simply a great site, this. heavy on the images, but worth it -check out the links to other sites