The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends

Flaming Lips成立于1983年的The Flaming Lips，早年是一队深受Buffhole Surfers影响的噪音摇滚（Noise Rock）乐团。由八十年代过度至九十年代，适逢九十年代初叶Alternative Rock狂流冲击着主流乐坛，The Flaming Lips亦跟众多美国另类摇滚乐队一样，与主流唱片公司（Warner Bros）签下一纸合约。当年他们的杀手锏，是在台上表演“放火”以作哗众取宠。
　　The Flaming Lips过去几年间之辉煌成就，足已叫大家忘掉他们曾是一队多年来只能半红不黑的美国另类摇滚乐队。看着灵魂人物Wayne Coyne由早年的长发摇滚型男，而变成看似黑帮大佬的中年男人，他的音乐才华与创意却似乎也一并随着年龄增长。The Flaming Lips以其对摇滚乐的独特见解，风格迥异的作品，在赢得了无数歌迷拥戴的同时，也赢得了圈内同行的尊重。
　　Flaming Lips自出道以来，一直以其多变的曲风，潇洒自如的演绎，对作品独特的处理方式为其金字招牌，无论是充满暴力激情的朋克，场面宏大的华丽摇滚，还是充满怀旧情调的哀婉小曲，他们的演绎总是那样不瘟不火、游刃有余。而最难能可贵的是，这些风格迥异的作品竟然如此和谐地出现在同一张专辑中，形成了一个完美的整体。一般常识认为，任何一张专辑总会有一两个亮点，而要达到曲曲动听、入耳皆溶的效果，无论对于异常挑剔的歌迷还是作风严谨的音乐人，都是可遇而不可求的。更何况多变的风格、大相径庭的方式呢？而这却正是Flaming Lips一直坚持的风格，这就越发使人对Flaming Lips肃然起敬了。
Bono may be the archetype for the do-gooder rock star who wants to heal the world, but if any musician is going to broker peace in the Middle East, convince North Korea to deep-six its nukes, and get the original line-up of Guns N' Roses back together, it's Wayne Coyne. With the possible exception of Arcade Fire, everyone loves Wayne-- from the executives who've let the Flaming Lips follow their madcap muse on Warner Brothers' dime for 20 years now, to the Oklahoma legislators who named "Do You Realize??" the official state rock song, to Kevin Durant and the tall one from LMFAO. On paper, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends-- a Record Store Day round-up of various collaborations conducted over the past year-- doesn't appear to be the next official chapter in the band's ever-evolving history so much as a tribute to Coyne's skills of diplomacy, like his hyperactive Twitter feed brought to life. The internet may have splintered the pop monoculture into myriad musical streams, but Heady Fwends provides as inclusive a congregation of the entire, circa-2012 under-to-overground spectrum as you can muster in a single album, with a guest list that spans top-40 stars (Ke$ha, Chris Martin) and noise-rock extremists (Lightning Bolt), anarchic avant guardians (Nick Cave, Yoko Ono) and chilled-out indie new-schoolers (Bon Iver, Neon Indian), electronic experimentalists (Prefuse 73) and hip-hop heroes-cum-children's-television hosts (Biz Markie). Really, all you need to complete the picture is a Pauly D remix. When the Lips started plotting these collaborations last year, they seemed like the latest in a growing line of guinea-pig projects that have kept the band busy since 2009's Embryonic, click-bait novelties to be filed alongside the six-hour songs and gummy-skull-encased USB sticks. And while the first of these pairings to surface-- EPs with Neon Indian, Lightning Bolt, Prefuse 73, and Yoko Ono, each represented here with a single track-- yielded interesting moments of aesthetic intersection, their free-form nature didn't exactly demand repeat listens. The songs on Heady Fwends are likewise rife with indicators of their hastily cobbled-together origins: flubbed vocal cues, songs obviously constructed via email file swaps (Ono's "Do It!"), goofy lyrics that sound like they were written seconds before recording ("You always want/ To shave my balls/ That ain't my trip"). But here's the craziest thing about the whole project: This piecemeal patchwork of tracks hangs together amazingly well as a front-to-back album-- to the point where, if the band had released this as the official follow-up to Embryonic, without the public stunt-casting campaign and Record Store Day tie-in, no Flaming Lips fan would feel short-changed. If anything, Heady Fwends is arguably an even more wiggy experience than Embryonic, an album that marked the Lips' return to brain-bending, fuzz-covered psychedelia, but was still very much beholden to the record-collector canon of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Can. Heady Fwends immediately adopts a more sacrilegious tack. Not only do the Lips lead with their most unlikely and unapologetically obnoxious collaborator, Ke$ha, they let her run roughshod on a classic Stooges song: "2012" presents a mutant, robot-rock rewrite of "1969" that cranks up the original's Bo Diddley beat into an industrial-strength stomp and sees Ke$ha appropriating Iggy's "oh my and boo hoo" sneer as her own. But as chaotic and scatterbrained as the track is, it effectively sets the all-bets-are-off tenor of the record, and actually serves to introduce the predominant themes of science fiction and global apocalypse that run through many of the tracks here. And therein lies the key to approaching Heady Fwends: What at first seems rather silly actually proves to be quite purposeful. The subsequent synth-smeared ballad "Ashes in the Air" further reinforces this logic, with Coyne offering an almost comically grave account of being chased by "robot dogs" through some post-war wasteland, while Justin Vernon echoes each line with his best Rick Moranis-doing-Michael McDonald. But then the song blossoms into a disarmingly elegiac chorus that makes the scorched-earth scene suddenly feel very real and despairing. Taken back-to-back, "2012" and "Ashes in the Air" provide a handy microcosm of the emotional extremes between which the Flaming Lips vacillate on Heady Fwends. Fortunately, the album's expert sequencing makes the shifts between the two poles feel natural, and puts tracks that wouldn't necessarily stand on their own to effective transitional use. The Prefuse 73 collab "Supermoon Made Me Want to Pee" doesn't amount to much more than three minutes of manic, percussive propulsion, but, coming between the epic, Edward Sharpe-assisted folk reverie "Helping the Retarded to Know God" and the sun-kissed Tame Impala tryst "Children of the Moon" (the purest pop song in the batch), it serves an adrenalizing role akin to the one "On the Run" plays on the Lips' favorite Pink Floyd album. And you can thank Nick Cave for casting some of the Lips' previously released collaborations in a more favorable light: in the aftermath of the delightfully gonzo, Grinderman-in-space splatter of "You, Man? Human???", the Lightning Bolt-bolstered epic "I'm Working at NASA on Acid" assumes the mantle of Fwends' centerpiece track, with ominous acoustic-driven passages bookending an ecstatic, blast-off guitar jam that hearkens back to the Lips' In a Priest Driven Ambulance days. (The squelching, slow-motion Neon Indian entry "Is David Bowie Dying?" also feels much more dramatic in the context of Heady Fwends' more somber second act, rather than as the lead-off track to an EP.) But where most of the Heady Fwends collaborations up to this point have yielded outcomes where you can easily parse out what each party's bringing to the table, the late-game Erykah Badu appearance counts as the real revelation here. On their droning, distended 10-minute cover of the Ewan MacColl/Roberta Flack standard "The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face", the two entities blur into something nigh unrecognizable: The Lips' bombast is tempered into soothing gusts of distant distortion, while Badu's commanding presence is refashioned into that of a ghost communicating through a shortwave radio frequency. This stunner is unfortunately answered by Fwends' one out-and-out dud, "Thunder Drops", a piece of spaced-out Bowie karaoke (courtesy of Polyphonic Spree/Lips sideman Daniel Huffman, aka New Fumes) that never achieves the lift-off its grandiose intro suggests. But Heady Fwends' comes to a peaceful conclusion with "I Don't Want You to Die", a mournful piano ballad boasting a liberal quote of John Lennon's "Imagine" and a tasteful, middle-eight assist from Chris Martin. With Coyne reverting back to the creaky, Neil Youngian croon he hasn't really adopted since the 90s, the song presents a fearful rumination of death that feels like the more vulnerable flipside to the life-affirming gospel of "Do You Realize??" But it's also a welcome reminder that, stripped of all their spectacle and high-concept strategies, the Flaming Lips can still win you over the same way they did 20 years ago, with a sweet, sad melody and simple, affecting sentiment. "I love the Flaming Lips," Martin blurts out in the recording's dying seconds-- and, really, that's the only thing on this surprisingly substantial album that feels obvious.
如果你喜欢The Flaming Lips的专辑《The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends》里的歌曲可以把下面的歌曲连接发给你的朋友:
1.2012 (You Must Be Upgraded) [feat. Ke$ha, Biz Markie, and Hour of the Time Majesty 12] - The Flaming Lips
http://www.5nd.com/ting/550751.html
2.Ashes in the Air [feat. Bon Iver] - The Flaming Lips
http://www.5nd.com/ting/550752.html
3.Helping the Retarded to Find God [feat. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros] - The Flaming Lips
http://www.5nd.com/ting/550753.html
4.Supermoon Made Me Want to Pee [feat. Prefuse 73] - The Flaming Lips
http://www.5nd.com/ting/550754.html
5.Children of the Moon [feat. Tame Impala] - The Flaming Lips
http://www.5nd.com/ting/550755.html
6.That Ain't My Trip [feat. Jim James of My Morning Jacket] - The Flaming Lips
http://www.5nd.com/ting/550756.html
7.You, Man? Human??? [feat. Nick Cave] - The Flaming Lips
http://www.5nd.com/ting/550757.html
8.I'm Working at NASA on Acid [feat. Lightning Bolt] - The Flaming Lips
http://www.5nd.com/ting/550758.html
9.Do It! [feat. Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band] - The Flaming Lips
http://www.5nd.com/ting/550759.html
10.Is David Bowie Dying? [feat. Neon Indian] - The Flaming Lips
http://www.5nd.com/ting/550760.html
11.The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face [feat. Erykah Badu] - The Flaming Lips
http://www.5nd.com/ting/550761.html
12.Girl, You're So Weird [feat. New Fumes] - The Flaming Lips
http://www.5nd.com/ting/550762.html
13.Tasered and Maced [feat. Aaron Behrens of Ghostland Observatory] - The Flaming Lips
http://www.5nd.com/ting/550763.html