![]() The track climaxes with exhortations to chop off the king’s head, which leads us into an intergalactic funeral march (“Funeral Parade”). “Feedaloodum Beedle Dot,” in particular, is a twitchy, invigorating funk-rock workout, which, among other virtues, features the welcome return of the classic Steven Drozd distorted drum sound. There is a palpable and surprising trip-hop influence here, which, when combined with Jones’ highly British presence, suggests the vibe of a Gorillaz album. Both are preceded by mournful passages of spoken-word narration, delivered by Jones with all the wonder and detachment of a worldly nature documentarian. ![]() The former contains prototypical Coynisms like “The universe brought you here / The universe can take you away” the latter boasts stuttering hip-hop beats and a recurring synth effect that resembles an alien zipper sound. “The Sparrow” (not to be confused with 2009’s “The Sparrow Looks Up at the Machine”) and “Giant Newborn” set the tone here, two lightly psychedelic highlights full of oddball newborn imagery that would be intriguing even if they didn’t connect to a larger narrative. That’s not the same as saying King’s Mouth is the best late-period Lips album ( Embryonic simply rules too much), but after the ponderous indulgence of 2017’s frustrating Oczy Mlody, this is still a cause for celebration. I will, however, take joy in reporting that King’s Mouth is the Lips’ most ebullient and downright listenable album in years, with a surreal narrative arc and concision that recalls (if doesn’t quite equal) 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. That would be like trying to fact-check the science behind “Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles.” Suffice it to say that it’s a concept album involving birth, death, monarchy-a peculiarly British spin on the usual Wayne Coyne trippiness-and that it functions as a soundtrack to Coyne’s recent audiovisual art installation of the same name. I won’t bore you by attempting to describe the narrative plot of King’s Mouth, the group’s 15th (or 17th, or 18th-do those confounding Fwends releases count?) studio album. And no band has embraced that strangeness with as much enthusiasm and sheer inexhaustibility as the Lips. ![]() Now it’s 2019: The Flaming Lips have survived for a third of a century, and Clash guitarist Mick Jones (who, to his everlasting credit, had nothing to do with Cut the Crap) is prominently featured throughout their new album, narrating a head-scratching tale about a giant baby who grows up to be king. ![]() You would not, in 1985, have seen much possibility of their paths ever crossing. The two bands seemed drastically apart in both geography and circumstance: one disintegrating despite numerous Top 40 hits three years prior, the other in its chaotic (and fervently anti-commercial) infancy. Five thousand miles away, a young group of Oklahoma freaks was recording its first: a loud, gleeful, acid-damaged racket by the name of Hear It Is. In 1985, The Clash recorded its last album, an embarrassing and irredeemably noxious dud known as Cut the Crap.
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