Prospect recommends: the Flaming Lips

Originality is not a virtue normally associated with contemporary pop music but the Flaming Lips’s ceaseless innovation, both live and in the studio, continues to set them apart in the world of alternative rock. Their ability to mix vast tympanic beats with studio electronica, grungy guitars and orchestration, has won them three Grammy awards, including one for best engineered album. But it is Wayne Coyne’s vulnerable, lofted vocal which provides the band’s emotional core. Lyrically, his blend of philosophical inquiry and quirky sci-fi imagery are delivered like troubled missives from a technocratic dystopia, in which anything from a festering spider bite to a fight with a pink robot may occur.



In their early career, the Flaming Lips released a quadruple album, whose four discs are to be played simultaneously on four separate machines. This new double album Embryonic is somewhat less experimental. Three tracks already pre-released on a digital EP, including the groovy “Silver Trembling Hands,” are more traditionally psychedelic than their 1999 classic album, The Soft Bulletin, though still proffer the same dynamic and stylistic extremes for which the band is known. Live, on the other hand, their shows are as wild as ever, more akin to concept-art spectaculars than drab, alt rock services. Their latest performance has the band being born from an animated, 6ft vagina projected onto a screen, with Coyne himself emerging to surf the crowd in a 10ft see-through bubble.

Nick Crowe is a music writer