Archive Review: The Flaming Lips’ Clouds Taste Metallic (1995)

What the Meat Puppets are to Arizona, the Flaming Lips are to the great state of Oklahoma: a homegrown, acid-fed psychedelic partnership that has toiled away in the desert of obscurity for years. Much like the Puppets, the Lips have more than a decade of slugging away on the indie circuit under their belts and have found a loyal audience and earned a hard-won success from alternative music fans.

Few of the Lips’ hardcore fans are going to be disappointed with Clouds Taste Metallic, the band’s eighth album. A baker’s dozen of psychedelic-tinged, free-flowing songs that serve to create a sort of musical crazy quilt, the material on Clouds Taste Metallic is full of distorted guitars and random feedback, syncopated rhythms, and chaotic noise. At first listen, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of a hit single to found here; the songs create a seamless background to Wayne Coyne’s lilting vocals and oblique lyrical poetry.

Subsequent spins pull several candidates from the pack, such as the dynamic “Kim’s Watermelon Gun,” the cheery “This Here Giraffe,” or the esoteric “Brainville.” For the most part, the Flaming Lips tread close to the edge of madness with Clouds Taste Metallic, creating an uncompromising fusion of sound and thought that adds perfectly to their considerable musical legacy. (Warner Bros. Records, 1995)

Review originally published by Bone Music Magazine...