Albums of The Year # 75 Flaming Lips - American Head

 I can't stand it when shops start advertising Christmas at this time of year. Hey, it's not even Halloween yet! Especially this year of all years. But it's 75 days until Christmas day by reckoning and I have more albums that I'd like to acknowledge this year than previously. 

This probably means that I've listened to more new records this year than previously since I started this altogether foolhardy exercise. But there have certainly been a lot I liked. Starting with this one. From September.

Growing old disgracefully. That's Flaming Lips. Here they are with a new album, entitled American Head, their sixteenth in all since first setting sail on the sea to all things strange. way back in the early Eighties.

They're long since past the point of caring what anyone else thinks, if they ever did frankly, and American Head is the sound of them letting it all hang out with wild, middle aged abandon. With song titles such as At the Movies on Quaaludes and Mother I've Taken LSD, they're certainly flirting with self-parody, but the record is a diverting listen, though I didn't have the staying power to get through it at a single sitting.

Bands approach aging in different ways, and it seems that the Lips have opted for the Dude Lebowski option this time round. The presentation of their album sleeve seems to find them placing themselves in the tradition, (you decide if it's a noble one), of Hunter S. Thompson, Robert Crumb, Easy Rider and The Grateful Dead. Flying the Freak Flag in response to the absurdity of Middle America. Wayne Coyne has taken to wrapping himself in the Stars and Stripes in photo shoots of late, standing in front of a band that are quite clearly sticking up their middle finger to it and everything it represents.

We're living through very peculiar times of course and American Head is satirical and not particularly subtle comment on America in the era of Trump. This is the path Flaming Lips have chosen and you have to concede that after nearly forty years of doing what they do, the one thing you can say for them is that even if they echo their record collections, they still don't sound quite like anyone else.

I found the record slightly exhausting and bailed a few tracks from the end and I'm not sure if I'll be back. But then again I was never a huge devotee of the band, even at their peak. This is not it, that's for sure, but it has plenty to recommend it for those who are more partial to what they have to offer than I am. *

* Despite this rather negative last sentence the record is definitely worth a listen.