Events at the meta end of 2016 were beyond alarming, the rise of extremism on both geo-political and religious fronts has come, you sense, as a new kind of conservatism washing across all realms of our lives, from our discarded rights to privacy to the ever decreasing circles of cultural recycling which dominates the arts.
Some tiny consolation for this comes in the form of Wayne Coyne, the man who’s taken The Flaming Lips from Okie shit-kickers to festival headlining connoisseurs of free expression, one of the few bands on this ball of dust for whom THE RULES do not seem to apply.
This disregard for convention allows the collective to employ a twin track approach to their music, one that allows them to be critically heralded both for making a highly commercial record (2006’s At War With The Mystics) and then the curate’s eggs in a row of its follow ups (Embryonic, The Terror).
It’ll be little surprise that Oczy Mlody isn’t particularly like any of them, rather a dream-laden odyssey that frequently resembles a good and bad psychedelic experience, often to be found at different points in the same song.
The duality takes some getting used to – as did the other things in their arsenal of playfulness from the past – but as with closer We a Family, it shoulder-shrugs the responsibility for getting along with it back on the listener. The song itself is a duet with Miley Cyrus, of whom Coyne’s avuncular relationship has raised the odd eyebrow, but outside of that shell is a lucid, naive r&b vibe which the young protege coats with sugar and that the cosmic programming turns into a post modern nursery rhyme.
If that’s direct, the seven and a half minutes of Listening To The Frogs With Demon Eyes is the reverse, complete with amphibian sound effects and a haunted, post-modern Syd Barrett vibe which only re-affirms Coyne’s recent proclamations that The Lips will be spending the rest of whatever time we all have left on earth “doing what the f*ck we like”. He knows, by extension, that they get some “weird points” from their audience, a sort of allowance that’s spent here gleefully tapping at your mind’s window on Galaxy I Sink – and its musings on space time – along with One Night While Hunting For Faeries and Witches and Wizards To Kill, the latter’s itchy, skeletal krautrock not much in keeping with its fairytale prey.
On Oczy Mlody, concessions to the straights are clearly for wimps. But even accepting the not given context there are, depending on your point of view, lucky brushes with the real world or alternatively moments where the band thread together this new trip to the fruits of the past.
When they play in this dimension, what coalesces is fragile but genuinely beautiful; both the titular, instrumental opener and its successor How are spellbinding, high on melody and with Coyne’s falsetto igniting something spectral and epic. This approach also works fantastically when they choose to warp the country sound of Coyne’s home town on Sunrise (Eyes Of The Young) but is most poignant on The Castle, which revolves around the descent of a young girl into the depths of mental illness.
Perhaps you could argue the people best placed to explore these themes, to tell the untellable stories are of themselves unburdened by the rusty hinges of reality, morals or conservatism. As we enter possibly the darkest period of all our lives, it seems likely that Wayne Coyne and his bunch of lysergic star pilots are about to have the last laugh.
If they are, it’s for sure that Oczy Mlody will turn up somewhere amongst the rubble, smiling at the new reality.
