![]() ![]() Oh My Gawd, indeed.Īs Seeing the Unseeable progresses, the Flaming Lips begin inching closer and closer to the sound they were to perfect in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and Telepathic Surgery seems to bear this out to a fairly excessive degree. There’s also the impossible-to-grasp utter insanity of songs like “Maximum Dream for Evil Knievel”, where Coyne’s acid trips seem to take on a life of their own as stop-start guitar figures suggest a penchant for progressive rock. The pieces continue falling into place on the follow-up, 1987’s Oh My Gawd!!! Sure, the hyperactive “Everything’s Exploding” follows the standard guitar-heavy college rock playbook, but the psychedelics soon kick in with “One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning”, arguably their first “epic” track, where rambling electric guitar-led balladry collapses into slashing rock riffage, sounding like an early Pink Floyd jam session. Hear It Is has plenty of punk elements, but the Lips were already looking further over the horizon. Additionally, “Godzilla Flick” combines a whimsical pop culture touchstone with breezy acoustic guitar and an almost anthemic sense of musical richness. “Jesus Shootin’ Heroin” doesn’t just kick off the band’s penchant for knocking over the sacred cows of Christianity musically, it owes more to Black Sabbath than Bob Stinson with its doom-metal guitar chords and almost Gothic tone. While rough-hewn guitars and a bash-it-out, DIY aesthetic hovers over all ten tracks on Hear It Is, there are glimpses of greater ambition. The ‘Mats comparison carries over to the music as well, to some degree. Elsewhere, the band seems to adopt a sound that is freakishly close to that of the Replacements, largely because Coyne’s vocals were a dead ringer for Paul Westerberg. Opening track “With You” alternates between the acoustic folk of the verses and the pummeling electric crush of the choruses. At this point, the band consists of Coyne, bassist Michael Ivins, and drummer Richard English. Released in 1986 – two years after their self-titled debut EP and following the departure of Wayne’s brother Mark – Hear It Is shows relatively little of the sound that the Flaming Lips would pursue on later albums. Before the freak pop hit that landed them on Beverly Hills, 90210, before singer/guitarist Wayne Coyne’s rumpled white suit, before the boom-box experimentalism of Zaireeka, before the head-scratching Miley Cyrus collaborations, the Lips were signed to Restless Records and recorded a string of rough, strange, aggressive music at the tail end of the 1980s. A collection of their first four full-length studio albums in addition to two discs of rarities from that period, Seeing the Unseeable is the Flaming Lips in all their nascent, punk rock, salad-day glory. That’s where Seeing the Unseeable: The Complete Studio Recordings of the Flaming Lips, 1986-1990 comes in. And while the consistent thread throughout the band’s discography has been a unique strain of “weirdness”, it’s also breathtaking to take in their evolution over the course of 14 studio albums and various projects and collaborations.īut before the band of oddballs from Norman, Oklahoma became the de facto indie experimental freaks the world knows and loves, there was an early, rawer, more direct sound to their music. It can be difficult to fathom the fact that the Flaming Lips have been together in some form or another for 35 years.
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