The Flaming Lips – Clouds Taste Metallic (1995)

The Flaming Lips didn't get much fame until their ninth album The Soft Bulletin and it wasn't until the tenth album Yoshimi Battles Pink Robots before they became well-known for wider audiences. First it seems a bit strange why a band like them had to go through so many albums before their big break, but if you listen to these early albums, it's not actually that difficult to see why. Clouds Taste Metallic is the band's seventh album and this was expected to be the one that would get some wider recognition. Then again, the sounds on this album are still very lo-fi. I'm quite surprised that this is even released by Warner Brothers, who are a huge record company. Then again, what came after is even stranger. 4 CD Zaireeka was meant to be played on four separate stereos and each CD has different tracks for the same songs, so they need to be clicked on play simultaneously.



The Flaming Lips isn't only known for their crazy sounds. They have also had some insane live performances. The craziest of which is probably the gig where they were just listening to music in a van and the audience at a music festival could only see some video footage from outside the van. The Flaming Lips got banned from that festival as a result.

Clouds Taste Metallic has some good songs, but it would be interesting to hear how these songs would sound like with a bit more polished sounds. I mean, if you like lo-fi sounds, this is exactly what you want, but it's difficult to know just how great they might sound like with more polished production. I really like the album cover of this album. Not really the front cover, but the back cover where there is a photo of a cloudy sky and it has a text that says "These Clouds are real!!".

The album starts with a song The Abandoned Hospital Ship that has some massive growth throughout the song. It is like a song made for a big stage, but played with such noisy and strange sounds that it can hardly ever reach a huge stage. Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles is a fantastic garage psychedelia song that kind of sounds like Syd Barret era Pink Floyd. Placebo Headwound has some great songwriting. I particularly like the bass lines and the odd middle part. If there's one song on this album that caught my attention when I first heard it, it's This Here Giraffe. The lyrics are just bizarre. Brainville has some excellent strange sounds and a melody that reminds me of a carnival. Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World obviously has a great title, but also it's a great noisy pop song that sounds like a lo-fi version of an early Teenage Fanclub song. Kim's Watermelon Gun has some quite heavy guitar riffs and an upbeat, almost punk, intensity. They Punctured My Yolk is a ballad I guess, but the noisy sounds and strange psychedelic melodies kind of tell me it's wrong to call it a ballad. Christmas at the Zoo is a fantastic pop song with some very strange lyrics. The album ends with a distorted country song Bad Days which is actually really catchy.

The music video for This Here Giraffe is a great one. It's just mainly about Wayne Coyne waling around with his guitar singing the song, but there's also an actual giraffe in the video and some sequences with the full band. I think watching these music videos really opens up what's going on in the minds of The Flaming Lips. Or not...

I do like to listen to albums like this with friends who are also into music, because there's always something strange to be found in albums like this. It's not necessarily stuff that I would much listen to by myself, but it's more than anything social music that raises great discussions.

Listen to the album on Spotify.