The Flaming Lips - Oczy Mlody

Rating:

The Flaming Lips do what they want even if it’s not quite what we want them to do.

There can be few more frustrating bands in music than The Flaming Lips. Wayne Coyne’s band of experimental oddballs’ are capable of the most wondrous inspiring pop but are just as equally capable of making indulgent bobbins. In recent years, you haven’t been sure just what version of Flaming Lips you’re going to get.

‘Oczy Mlody’ is as baffling a Flaming Lips album as you’d expect. It’s more downbeat and reflective, like on the gentle, pastoral psych of ‘How’ and ‘There Should Be Unicorns’. Unfortunately, the pace rarely quickens and the album is short on excitement. It’s not short on ideas, though; the Lips still make music like almost nobody else. What other band are going to make a song as brilliantly bonkers as ‘One Night While Hunting For Faeries and Witches and Wizards to Kill’?

As with most recent Flaming Lips albums, you long for a piece of pop perfection like ‘Race For The Prize’ or ‘Do You Realize?’ They’re not a band to give you what you want, though, and for that, they have to be commended. Still travelling on their wonderful sonic voyage, The Flaming Lips do what they want even if it’s not quite what we want them to do. Martyn Young