The Flaming Lips
King's Mouth: Music and Songs
Release Date: Apr 13, 2019
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Indie/Alternative
Record label: Warner Bros.
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Album Review: King's Mouth: Music and Songs by The Flaming Lips
Very Good, Based on 12 Critics
Based on rating 4/5
Available as a special, limited edition for Record Store Day, and released more widely in July, this 15th Flaming Lips record - rumoured to be a kind of Wayne Coyne solo project - finds the band more playful, cinematic and cohesive than they've been since 'Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots' Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Once upon a time there was a giant king baby who, when he grew up, unexpectedly had the whole of outer space, the aurora borealis and the thunderstorms from the south get sucked into his giant head. All while single-handedly holding back an avalanche threatening to destroy his kingdom he's killed - only for his severed head, when dipped in steel, to live on as a kind of cranial bouncy castle, where visitors can climb in his mouth and gaze blissfully up at the stars and thunderstorms still inside, a bit like a really psychedelic hippy version of Pompeii's celebrated Masturbating Man.
Based on rating 4/5
The 15th album by The Flaming Lips is compiled of tracks created for singer Wayne Coyne's immersive art installation of the same name. 'King's Mouth' was first conceived in 2015 as an “Immersive Head Trip Fantasy Experience” partially-inspired by a Japanese game show where ham-laden contestants had to face a hungry kimono dragon. It developed into a phantasmagoric spectacle of that pushed boundaries even by The Flaming Lips' garish standards.
Based on rating 7.5/10
The prospect of a new album from The Flaming Lips isn't quite as exciting as during their peak of the twin beauties that were 1999's The Soft Bulletin and 2002's masterpiece Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, as they have slowly become something of a parody of themselves with a stream of collaboration albums and output which got ever poorer, culminating in 2016's forgettable Oczy Mlody. There were some highlights during this time, as The Terror is a better album in hindsight, and their production work on half of the Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz project yielded the stunning 'Karen Don't Be Sad', which is up there with their best songs, but on the whole it seemed as though the band were steadily losing their spark. Originally packaged as a limited vinyl run for the bullshit that is Record Store Day (I mean, c'mon - have you checked how many scavengers, sorry 'fans', flog their RSD purchases for overly inflated prices on the same day), the album now gets a full release.
Based on rating 7.5/10
In a turbulent career which has spanned fuzzy post-punk and ostentatious space rock antics, The Flaming Lips have proved adept in the art of flouting expectation with irregular frequency; recent collaborative turns, with the likes of Miley Cyrus having served to broaden the band's usual niche profile. This fifteenth LP, originally released for Record Store Day, as such, finds Wayne Coyne et al navigating Yoshimi and At War With The Mystics-era territory. Accompanying its namesake touring art-installation, King's Mouth is a whimsical affair; a quasi-psychonautical trip which revels in characteristic bohemian bravado.
Based on rating 3.5
By the time any band gets to their 15th studio album, you’d think that any preconceived notions of what you would find within would be absolutely confirmed. But The Flaming Lips don’t usually do things one might consider to be conventional, and they never have. There are, much to the band’s credit, about four or five different jumping-on points in their massive catalogue.
Based on rating 3.5/5
A partial return to excellence. The Flaming Lips have never been a band to shy away from the grandiose. Drawing influence from prog greats over the course of their career - while arguably, in the process, becoming one - they've pieced together their share of elaborate concept albums, be it the robotic themes of Yoshimi or the weird, tripped out space of Oczy. Still, they've never properly crafted a story; something that goes all-out with characters, a plot, and full narration.
Based on rating 7.0/10
If there's been one constant in The Flaming Lips' careening four-decade evolution from Okie goth-punk weirdos to festival-conquering freak show, it's that Wayne Coyne loves to tell a story. Back on 1989's Telepathic Surgery, he hit pause on the album's acid-fried garage rock to relate a childhood encounter with UFOs. Throughout the '90s, he specialized in the sort of musical tall tales ("Put the Waterbug in the Policeman's Ear," "The Big Ol' Bug Is the New Baby Now") that required narrative exposition nearly as long as the tunes they were teeing up.
Based on rating 7/10
Part of a larger work that also includes a book and an art installation, on King's Mouth: Music and Songs the Flaming Lips revisit the heartfelt yet massive-sounding songs that earned albums like Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots so much love and acclaim. This return isn't a total surprise; after the musically and emotionally challenging Embryonic and The Terror, the band had already shifted to a lighter sound on Oczy Mlody. Hints of that album pop up on songs like "The Sparrow," which boasts a nursery rhyme melody reminiscent of "The Castle" as well as gritty drums and blobby synths that could have been borrowed from Yoshimi.
Based on rating 7/10
Even today, nearly 40 years after the band's inception, it remains hard to pin down what, exactly, makes a Flaming Lips record. The pastel colours of its sound? The loopy surprise of its lyrics? Or maybe the unmistakable voice of frontman (and figurehead) Wayne Coyne — so world-weary, so naïve. In any case, listen to just a few minutes of their fifteenth studio album King's Mouth: Music and Songs and you'd be hard-pressed to say that this album is anything other than pure, unalloyed, Lips (whatever that might mean). Conceptually and ….
Based on rating 7/10
On paper, King's Mouth is the most "Flaming Lips" release you could possibly imagine. Of course, it comes from an art installation where you enter a giant metallic head through a foam mouth only to be hit with a psychedelic explosion of sound and visuals! It's so Flaming Lips, of course it does! Yeah, the accompanying tale is about a giant king baby, who grows to suck the whole of the universe, thunderstorms from the south, and the aurora borealis into his giant head. It's a child's tale of psychedelic wonderment that you'd expect from the mind of Wayne Coyne.
Opinion: Excellent
B efore we turn to the Flaming Lips' 15th studio album, it's worth considering the extremely peculiar path that has brought the Oklahoma trio to this point. They began life as a minor psychedelic alt-rock band with seemingly zero mainstream commercial potential beyond hand-to-mouth survival, on the same US post-punk gig circuit that supported umpteen bands with zero mainstream commercial potential in the mid-80s. When they were signed to a major label in 1991, it looked like one of the grandest acts of folly yet in the crazed search to find the next Nirvana: their debut release under their new deal was an EP called Yeah I Know It's a Drag, But Wastin' Pigs Is Still Radical.
Opinion: Average
Originally released as a limited run of gold vinyl for Record Store Day, King's Mouth, the fifteenth studio album by The Flaming Lips, began as a giant metallic head. In 2015 the psych-rock band's frontman, Wayne Coyne unveiled a large-scale art installation in his hometown of Oklahoma City. Described as an immersive listening experience - accented with garish neon hues, the sculpture's silver exterior resembles a cousin twice removed from The Martian Leader in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! - spectators were invited to step inside the head and met with a dangling kaleidoscopic light show accompanied by fourteen minutes of music, condensed from the album's forty-one minute duration.
'King's Mouth: Music and Songs'
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