I’m pretty proud of the punny title, but it means I have to make a point with it.

I don’t think Wayne Coyne can release an album of music that can be played with four people anymore. Pre-Recorded tracks aside, You cannot recreate what The Flaming Lips do on album live with four people playing instruments. I’m sure even the most accomplished user of a loop pedal would toil for hours before saying “It just can’t be done, man, here’s your $500 back.” I gave him $500 dollars (my birthday money this year) and told him he could keep it if he could put out a Lips-like production arranged for a four-piece band that didn’t bore the audience with looping. I figure he’d score the different elements and then divde by 4 and that would be how long it’d take the band to get everything ready.

I imagine that Wayne is a tinkerer, content to mess around in the studio for 12 months adding harmonies to this, vocals to that, and running this piano melody through a flanger and then playing it backwards so you get the whooshing sound as the notes are played, and he makes it sound like each note is a volume palindrome. Aside from the initial conception and final product, I am sure that there were many points in the production of these songs that you could call it a finished product, so it’s gotta be a tough job as a musician to say “Okay, this is done.” I assume you just know after you put the third version of reverb on the vocals and fourth effect on lead guitar that you say “Perfect! Dave, come listen to this!”

“Listen, you’ll hear it / we’re gettin’ near it / It’s comin’ I can feel it / ’cause I know you’re goin’ away”

The closing track of this amalgam of old and new, reference and ponderance, is very fitting. Opening as a simple piano and vocal number, “Goin’ On” is a crushing ode to acceptance and perfectly frames what it’s like on the cusp of rejecting it. The sense of finality evoked by the end of the song when he sings “We’re goin’.. on..” is so devastating that ending this album it keeps you placated for a moment before you realize music is over. The song encloses the path created by “The Sound Of Failure / It’s Dark… Is It Always This Dark?” As if the character is older, but still exasperated by the begrudging optimism many people expect you to have in the face of hard times. The notion of choosing failure, or asking for help in hard times reminds me how I like when people have to set things aside to deal with strife and how glorious they appear when they’re not trying to take advantage of you unconsciously, or not.

Subtly, or not, The Flaming Lips will ensnare your conscious and fill it with existential ponderings, only these are the good kind, where you decide to have fun with it, instead of be paralyzed by dancing on the cusp of the “universal truth”.

If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go lie down with the stereo on. It’s simply a great album.