THE FLAMING LIPS

January of 2016 officially marked 30 years since The Flaming Lips’ first full-length album, a tripped-out set of woozy psychedelic sing-alongs titled Hear It Is . If you were to make a list of bands that would be active three decades later—let alone ones that would eventually sign to a major label, sell millions of records, appear in TV commercials, and record with teen pop icons—the Oklahoma trio with bad haircuts and a bizarre sense of humor would have been very low on that list. If you were told that they would accomplish all of that without changing their idiosyncrasies, that they would sell millions of records while getting weirder and more eccentric along the way, it would have been utterly unthinkable. There was simply no precedent for a band like The Flaming Lips.

If you listen to Hear It Is today it is a time capsule for the sort of buzzy, scuzzy mid-’80s indie rock that laid the groundwork for the movement’s commercial breakthrough half a decade later, but it’s also remarkable just how much the Lips’ aesthetic is already in place at that early stage. There’s a surprisingly sweet acoustic ballad that builds into a massive wall-of-sound of guitar feedback and drum rolls (“With You”). There’s a go-nowhere hypnotic ballad titled “She Is Death,” and a goofy riff-rock anthem called “Charles Manson Blues.”

There are moments of provocation, such as the epic psych-doom recasting of Biblical characters into a junkie drama in “Jesus Shootin’ Heroin.” A lot of the album is more or less unremarkable and overly simplistic, especially considering the series of classics that would come next, but its more reflective moments are already pointing forward to the band they’d become. The sense of longing, of reaching out into a confusing, incomprehensible world to find other confusing, incomprehensible people, is already there. (Sample lyric: “When I walk with you, I feel weird/When I talk with you, I feel weird.”) There’s also a sense of absurdity, of celebrating the surreal. But there’s always a sense of unspeakable melancholy underlying it all, a sense of tragedy and beauty always balancing each other. It’s a feeling that turns up a lot on Oczy Mlody , their sixteenth full-length studio album.

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