Big Reveal

Last week I heard a few of the Flaming Lips songs that will be on their new album and, surprisingly enough, I am not repulsed. Definitely do not have any of the sick feelings I had when I first heard The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song and wanted to kabob all of my other Lips albums because of it. I mean, the new songs are not really great, they don't rank with the best the Lips have ever done, but definitely do not make me feel any need to make vows and curses against the band. So far. Here's what I think:

"Convinced Of The Hex": Pretty monotonous, especially the vocal. Kind of boring in the verses, but the, what I guess you would call, chorus, I can kind of get into. But I can actually get into the instrumentation of it quite a bit more.

"The Impulse": Least favorite of the three by miles. Pretty crappy actually in my opinion. Boring, BORING music and a robot-voiced vocal. Someone tell Wayne that nobody wants to hear robot voices and he is not Dennis DeYoung. A shame because it actually sounds like the melody/lyric might be something to listen to if he didn't ruin it with the effect. Something like this is bound to show up on a double album, I definitely get the feeling that the Lips are not making a double album because they're just too full of good ideas. More like they want to clean the closet of half-baked ideas like this.

"Silver Trembling Hands": This is the one that actually gives me hope. Actually almost sounds good enough to be on Zaireeka. Though maybe a Zaireeka unfortunately filtered through the band that made Yoshimi, so a little less than. But still, the vocal is good (though the lyric is meh), the music has some of that great alternating of screaming and floating that was prevalent on Zaireeka and The Soft Bulletin.

So, if this album is more 1 & 3 and not so much 2, I could actually get into it. And I think if this album redeems them a little in my eyes, maybe I'll finally go back and listen to At War With The Mystics. Knowing that they're still capable might make that album a little more palatable.