#42

I really don’t get this. The Flaming Lips have always been whimsical.

Even on the albums everyone professes to love upthread you have songs like ‘Frogs’, ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ and ‘This Here Giraffe’! The band even complain to this day about the lyrics for Clouds Taste Metallic being too whimsical.

#43

Hmm, if whimsy is by definition fanciful or odd, then yes, we’ve got this wrong - in my head it’s more that they’re whimisical to the point of being precious, or so purposefully odd (through repetition) that it has become grating (like most things do). Perhaps any individual absent of addictive behaviour can’t be expected to embrace more than a few albums of full on whimsy without losing a taste for it, like sweet food or something. Perhaps saccharine is a better word? I don’t know, all I know is that I couldn’t listen to an album with Waiting for a superman and Race To The Prize more than a few times without losing interest / fundamentally reforming my opinion of a favourite band.

Clearly this is “a thing” or we wouldn’t still be having this discussion!

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#44

Totally agree that they’re a whimsical band, but on the earlier records thought this was balanced out by some darker stuff - like Hit to Death has Halloween On The Barbary Coast and You Have To Be Joking as well as Frogs on it. I totally don’t hate this aspect of them either and didn’t mean to give that impression. Just seems to me that on the later records the whimsy seemed to become their defining characteristic rather than just a part of their make up.

#45

I would argue that one _The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi…, Embryonic and The Terror all balance those whimsical flights with darker material. The lyrics on those four albums tends toward more serious subjects, though the music might not suggest it.

I think a lot of the time people get distracted by ‘Do You Realize??’ or ‘Yoshimi…’ itself without concentrating on the other songs. Any of the rest of the songs from the albums I mentioned can be pretty bleak or downbeat (or, like ‘The Gash’ quite uplifting.).

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#46

What @funkycow said. Plus, to me early-ish Lips whimsy (for want of a better word) is fun, which I don’t find the case with the Lips’ later material. My problem with songs like Prize, Superman, DYR??? etc. is that Wayne is trying far too hard to say something serious (maaan), and I don’t think he’s particularly good at it. For me, his brand of whimsy plus extra preciousness and attempted profundity adds up to trite and heavy-headed songs with the subtlety of a boot in the face. I didn’t mind these songs and their brethren when I was younger (when they came out) but after 15-20 years or so they’ve lost all impact and now they actively irritate me (particularly DYR???, which as I mentioned up thread, I actively never want to hear again for the rest of my natural life).

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#47

Interestingly, I’ve gone the opposite way with Mercury Rev - I couldn’t stand The Secret Migration when it came out and barely got through my first listen before consigning the CD to the back of a shelf. Ten years later I gave it another try, and for some reason I found the faeries and horses and forests thing far less annoying, so much so that I could finally hear how wonderful the songs themselves were.

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#48

I wish Mercury Rev had gone further down the their SYOTOS, that was quite a unique album in sound and laden with high quality songwriting, yet we all talk about Deserter’s Songs (reverentially) or Yerself/Boces (from a “we love guitars” p.o.v.) (and Boces was not as good as Yerself) and omit this frankly fantastic piece of work.

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#49

To put things even more bluntly, my younger self used to listen to the likes of Superman, DYR??? and think “I bet these songs will have the power to help me through tough times in later life”. When tough times came, as they eventually do to us all, those songs had the opposite effect - what I used to consider endearing, comforting and charming felt smug, overbearing and devoid of any real insight into the human condition.

(ouch!) :wink:

#50

Absolutely - Boces is slighty uneven compared to Steam, but SYOTOS is a beautifully strange piece of work that straddles the two phases of their career beautifully. I remember reading how devastated Jonathan Donahue was when it failed commercially, because he felt he and the band had put everything into writing and recording it.

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#51

both alright
think mercury rev have the more interesting back catalogue but flaming lips managed to tap into a nice and comforting sound (even though their stuff is pretty varied it all sounds kind of the same, if that make sense).
Hercules by mrev is a brilliant song

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#52

I can see how he would feel like that. Unfairly overlooked. In fact, I’m going to listen to it now.

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#53

I’ve bought YIS on blue vinyl too. You’re right, it’s gash. The CD is much better.

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#54

I agree, I think that’s why the more whimsical moments on those albums (and Mystics and the prior ones) never bothered me. I usually have no tolerance for it (25 years later the intro to The Sweater Song still stresses me out), but with them the sadness has always overshadowed the whimsy significantly. If anything they used it effectively as a guide into the bleaker themes,

#55

Listening to Yerself Is Steam and doing a wee net/Wikipedia trawl of both the Lips and Rev. I must admit, this quote by Wayne Coyne is wonderfully humble and lovely to read:

"I think without Deserter’s Songs being so significant, The Soft Bulletin would probably have not been followed too much. But since it was put in the same vein, people became very interested in us."

I completely agree: TSB would never have gained the traction it did without DS paving the way beforehand - the NME’s 1998 and 1999 Albums Of The Year, if I recall correctly, and back then that sorta meant something…

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#56

A wonderful Jonathan Donahue interview reminiscing on how “Deserter’s Songs” came into being…

#57

And again from the same publication, Wayne talking about TSB’s inception…

#58

I seem to recall the first Mercury Rev albums with the other singer are almost like a different band. I mean the classic response to me being ‘so-so’ about Deserter’s Songs was “Oh you should hear their early stuff”.

Anyway, it feels a bit of a cheat to compare for that reason but there are so many Flaming Lips albums out there I may have missed when they were a completely different sounding band.

#59

It’s slightly hard for me to separate the first two Mercury Rev albums from the next two. David Baker shared vocals with Jonathan Donahue from the start; they both had their “own” songs as far as lead vocals were concerned, and JD and Grasshopper were always the main driving force/songwriters in the band. I don’t want to denigrate DB’s contributions to YIS and Boces, but at the same time, I’m not going to romanticise his relatively minor part in what made the band incredible…

#60

And my last comment makes me wonder whether my early MR fanboy-ism is different to everybody else’s, because despite how astonishingly wonderful they were, I reckon they’d have been even better without having David Baker to worry about. If nothing else, See You On The Other Side proves that early Rev didn’t need DB to make transcendental music…

#61

Probably shouldn’t have voted Lips as I haven’t heard much Mercury Rev outside of ‘Deserters Songs’ which is brilliant (Levon Helm fuck yeah!). My fault entirely.

I always attribute the Lips to my drug induced college days which means they still have a special place in my heart (not that I do drugs anymore mind you, just remember loving ‘Soft Bulletin’ and ‘Clouds Taste Metallic’ were great records to play high with great friends). Always did think Wayne was a bit of a buffoon.

Listened to ‘Yoshimi’ recently still holds up imo.

All in all, need to reassess by listening to more Mercury Rev, which I will surely do.

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