By Max Hill
Artist: The Flaming Lips
Album: The Terror
The Flaming Lips have never been an easy band to categorize, but one mood they’re rarely associated with is melancholy. There’s a wistful, nostalgic quality to their The Soft Bulletin era material, and some of their earlier tracks embrace an apathetic worldview that seems miles away from the life-affirming electro-pop of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.
The Terror marks The Flaming Lips’ first album since 2009’s Embryonic. Following on the heels of a series of high-profile collaborations with artists like Lightning Bolt and Bon Iver, The Terror is the darkest, most abrasive record the band’s ever made.
Inspired by lead singer Wayne Coyne’s split with his partner of 25 years, as well as percussionist Steven Drozd’s struggles with drug addiction, The Terror is an atmospherically and sonically dense record coated in hazy dark ambience and peppered with sparse, chirpy electronics. Wayne’s vocals have never been stronger, or more
emotional: for a band so well-known for its theatricality, both on-stage and on-record, The Terror’s 11 tracks seem uncharacteristically honest and intimate. “Try to explain why you’ve changed/I don’t think I understand,” Wayne sings over underwater background vocals and dissonant, Radiohead-style drum machines.
This is a version of the band we’ve never seen before: if the band’s string of jubilant, Beach Boys-meets-LCD Soundsystem pop records were the party, The Terror is the lonely, selfreflective hangover. The Flaming Lips manage to turn the record into a cathartic, insightful and musically rewarding experience rather than a selfindulgent crawl; that speaks to their ability to adapt and expand their style while remaining one of indie music’s most dependable bands.
Artist: Tyler, The Creator
Album: Wolf
Tyler Gregory Okonma, mouthpiece of Odd Future and aggressive Twitter presence, has a narcissistic streak. If his modesty-shirking stage name didn’t clue you in, his songs surely will. Wolf, like Bastard and Goblin before it, is a solipsistic stage play in which Tyler spins a yarn of alter-egos in order to self-diagnose his many neuroses.
Whether he’s longing for his late grandmother, wilting in the harsh face of his sudden stardom or searching for rapid-fire revenge on his detractors and childhood bullies, Wolf sounds more like an album Tyler wrote for himself than any of his fans. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; the rapper and burgeoning sketch comedy star seems committed to ignoring the reactions of his audience, both positive and negative, and it surely helps him to focus his creative energy towards making the music he wants to make. If only it came off as less uneven and unfocused.
Wolf has its strong points: Tyler’s flow is as strong as always, and although his humour verges towards the juvenility his listeners have come to expect, he clearly flat-out enjoys being an emcee. Tracks like “48” and “Lone” show a surprisingly mature side of the rapper, and lead single “Domo23” is as silly and infectious as anything Odd Future has ever done.
Despite its strong points, Wolf comes off as an unorganized, bloated mess — Tyler is trying to say too many things at once, attempting to balance the misogynistic, anecdotal approach of his earlier albums with a more mature, conscious style inspired by Lupe Fiasco and Nas. Unfortunately for Tyler, he isn’t a talented enough rapper to handle both.
Artist: Besnard Lakes
Album: Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO
When Montreal-based band The Besnard Lakes released Are the Roaring Night in 2010, music critics were impressed. With songs clocking in at over six minutes, Are the Roaring Night offered a more chal- lenging listen, each presenting a slow entrance, but always rocketing up to a summit of distorted guitars, ephemeral ef- fects, sharp drumming, synth drones and reverb-laden, breathy vocals. Devout fol- lowers, myself included, soon ensued.
Their new album, Until In Excess, Im- perceptible UFO, presents similar charac- teristics to their previous work, but moves from the crashing crescendos of intermin- gled instruments to dreamier and softer peaks. The band still adheres to the long songs and slow-to-swell climaxes, but lim- its the all-out musical assaults from Are the Roaring Night. And unfortunately, I miss it.
Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO begins with “46 Satires”. There is a full mo- ment of a low synthesizer before the guitar and vocals even enter the song. When the vocals finally hit, Olga Goreas lyrics are, fittingly for the album title, hard to under- stand and imperceptible because of the distortion.
The slow-to-progress momentum is followed by another sleepy track, but the album eventually kicks it up a notch on “People of the Sticks.” This song offers the first up-tempo (or at least awake) melody that finally catches some of my attention.
Lamentably, the effect doesn’t last long, because the next few songs pass without much notice. “And Her Eyes Were Painted Gold” is the last noticeable track, but the dreamy echoes of Beach Boys- esque vocals aren’t nearly enough to save the album.
If you are into 90s shoegaze and are looking for a soft, slightly psychedelic album, then Until in Excess, Impercepti- ble UFO may do the trick. If not, the echo- ing sounds will do what it did to me: sadly, put you to sleep.
THROWBACK REVIEW
By Max Hill
Artist: Elvis Costello
Album: My Aim is True and This Year’s Model
On his incendiary debut My Aim is True, Elvis Costello is to the 70s what Bob Dylan was to the 60s: an angry young man who knew how to turn his 20-something angst into insightful rock and roll brilliance. From the power-pop of opener “Welcome to the Working Week”, to the lyrically dense love balladry of “Alison”, to the early Talking Heads-style New Wave of “Less Than Zero”, it’s one of the most listenable, varied, and downright fantastic rock and roll albums of the 70s — and that might be the best decade rock and roll music will ever know.
If Costello had recorded one of the strongest rock and roll debuts of all time at the tender age of 23 — in 24 studio hours, no less — he would be a legend. But he didn’t just release My Aim is True and fade into obscurity. He followed it up with This Year’s Model, which took its predecessor’s youthful brilliance and fine-tuned it, focused it, and made an even better record out of it. The tender moments dig deeper, the punkrock moments rock harder and faster, the backing band is tighter, and Costello balances raw sex appeal and awkward literacy in the way only he can. How this man didn’t go down as one of the biggest sex symbols of the 70s, I’ll never know.
This Year’s Model is the mature, experienced counterpart to My Aim is True’s youthful exuberance; it’s impossible to review one without mentioning the other, and they always sound best when listened to in sequence.
These two albums, released back-to-back in 1977 and 1978, might be the best one-twopunch in rock and roll history — they’re certainly enough to rival Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Both pairs of records seem to say everything worth saying about being young and pissed off about it, whether in the swinging 60s or the afterparty of the 70s. I guess some things just never change.
