Word: songful
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Admittedly, most songs on the album last less than three minutes, making for quick, on-the-go, post-millennium punk. The creative song names also make up for the lack of uttered lyrics, with titles such as “Salt Swimmers” and “Thrills” implying an inherently poetic, rebellious symbolism. But instead of feeling a powerful sensation of anti-establishment, we’re left with a mix of strange emotions. The album builds up tension with its onerous layers of dissonance and noise, but ultimately provides no gratification. Catharis-seekers will find...
...nearly 30 years, and in that time they’ve produced 12 studio albums, 2 documentaries and a feature film; they’ve ridden the crest of approximately three musical waves; and they’ve recorded exactly one song—Okla. state rock song “Do You Realize??”—whose sheer transcendence has insured the band immortality beyond all possible contingency...
Opener “Convinced of the Hex” immediately grounds the album in totally foreign territory for Flaming Lips fans. Bass-heavy, rife with corrosive guitar licks and polyrhythmic percussion, the song features a spaced-out—and for the first time, restrained—vocal performance from Coyne. He’s still speaking his own half-cracked 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...
...gibberish as distinguishable lyrics. But the auditory pretend game is too rushed for comprehension, obscuring its sentimental moans with mismatched beats and forlorn growls. In “Venom,” drumbeats come in faltering steps and force unintended halts in the rhythm, ultimately transitioning the song into a fragmented and apparently unfinished conversation when it ends abruptly. The title track offers a moment of clarity with straightforward drumming and guitar riffs, but these are forced to wind through the formulaic, distorted vocals, with solos strewn in between for variety’s sake. In the end, the repetitiveness...
...previews made us think this song was in response to something happening with Quinn’s baby. We think it’s a bit much given the situation. Also, Avril? Really? Luckily, while the mangled syllables are still there, the arrangement is a big improvement. Dubbing an Avril echo onto an Avril voice track doesn’t do much for us, but having the chorus of guys echo the girls wrests emotions from the song that were absent in the original. The choreography melds all the cliques well, but that last bit of hand-holding?...