Word: rocke
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Following a side trip to Los Angeles indie-rock land in You Don't Love Me Yet, novelist Jonathan Lethem returns to the territory that has proved particularly fruitful for him this past decade - his home town of New York City. Yet, unlike Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, his latest, Chronic City, is set across the East River, in a Manhattan just a few degrees askew from reality. Lethem spoke to TIME about the American obsession with its own pop culture and why book readings are typically a snore...
Like the Grateful Dead, that other storied American collective, the Flaming Lips are the residue of a revolutionary and long-outmoded turning point in popular music: the Dead had the psychedelic era; the Lips had punk rock. Both bands derive their sound from a host of intersecting genres and traditions: the Dead had blues, country, and folk; the Lips have punk, pop, and space rock. But unlike the Dead, or any other group of comparable longevity, the Flaming Lips have fashioned a legacy through constant rejuvenation. Their greatest albums—1993’s “Transmissions from...
...pseudo-religious language, but it’s obvious from the beginning that, for the first time in a long time, lyrics don’t matter very much to the Flaming Lips. The downright raucous “Aquarius Sabotage,” a sort of ecstatic surf-rock jam, equipped with glockenspiel and an orchestral coda, raises the paradox as its thesis: the Flaming Lips want their bull and their china shop too. The sonic center of the album, “Powerless,” is a sinister instrumental piece over which guitarist Steve Drozd erratically improvises...
...paranoiac subconscious of any one of the passengers aboard ship of fools that was “The Soft Bulletin.” It remains an open question as to whether the choice not to produce with David Friedman—known for his work in psych-rock band Mercury Rev—for the first time since 1989’s “Telepathic Surgery” allowed for this sudden burst of inspiration from the band...
...what’s already apparent—the Flaming Lips have made their first truly important record in a decade, and whether it meets expectations, perverts them, or annihilates them completely, “Embryonic” stands as yet another milestone for the veterans of the alternative rock aftermath: that of the difficult masterpiece...