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DEAP LIPS
The Flaming Lips + Deap Vally = Deap Lips.
The self-titled album releases March 13th 2020. Listen to 'Hope Hell High' & pre-order the album at www.deaplips.com
posted by derek brown - Dec 6, 2019 - 0 comments
THE FLAMING LIPS ANNOUNCE 'THE SOFT BULLETIN' 20TH ANNIVERSARY UK TOUR
The Flaming Lips announce ‘The Soft Bulletin’ 20th anniversary UK tour
Tom Skinner Mar 6, 2019 4:02 pm
It includes a show at London's Brixton Academy
The Flaming Lips will mark the 20th anniversary of ‘The Soft Bulletin’ by performing the classic album in full during a special UK tour. See the dates below.
Released in 1999, the critically acclaimed ninth record from the band features the singles ‘Race for the Prize’ and ‘Waitin’ for a Superman’. Following its arrival, the LP was named NME‘s album of the year.
Two decades later, it’s been announced that ‘The Soft Bulletin’ will be showcased in its entirety at shows in Edinburgh, Manchester, and London in Autumn this year. The three-day stint will conclude with a performance at Brixton Academy on September 7.
Tickets go on general sale this Friday (March 8) at 10 am.
The Flaming Lips play:
September 5 – Usher Hall, Edinburgh
September 6 – Manchester Academy, Manchester
September 7 – Brixton Academy, London
Back in 2011, The Flaming Lips performed the album in full at London’s Alexandra Palace as part of ATP’s Don’t Look Back series of shows.
Last year, the band released a Greatest Hits compilation – featuring material released between 1993 and 2017. B-sides, outtakes, and some more left-field cuts were also included.
Looking forward to new material, the US group’s fifteenth album ‘King’s Mouth’ – narrated by The Clash’s Mick Jones – is set for release next month. The follow-up to 2017’s ‘Oczy Mlody’ will arrive on April 13 via Warner Records.
In other news, The Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne married his longtime partner Katy Weaver earlier this year. The ceremony was held at an Oklahoma rooftop venue, where the couple later posed inside the band’s plastic bubble prop. Coyne famously crowdsurfs inside the ball at live gigs.
posted by derek brown - Mar 6, 2019 - 0 comments
FLAMING LIPS TO RELEASE NEW ALBUM KING'S MOUTH ON RECORD STORE DAY
Flaming Lips to Release New Album ‘King’s Mouth’ on Record Store Day
Band’s 15th LP will feature narration from the Clash’s Mick Jones
Jon Blistein February 28, 2019 3:19PM ET
The Flaming Lips 15th studio album 'King's Mouth' will feature the Clash's Mick Jones and arrive exclusively on Record Store Day.
The Flaming Lips will release their 15th studio album, King’s Mouth, on Record Store Day, April 13th.
The band will issue just 4,000 copies of the LP, which will be pressed on gold vinyl and will only be available at participating independent record stores. Another version of the album won’t hit the marketplace until July.
King’s Mouth follows the Flaming Lips’ 2017 album, Oczy Mlody. The record will feature 12 new tracks and the music will be connected by narration provided by the Clash’s Mick Jones.
The album is also just one aspect of a much larger project from the Flaming Lips and frontman Wayne Coyne. The music on King’s Mouth parallels that in Coyne’s immersive art installation of the same name, in which viewers crawl into a large metallic head to experience a music-driven LED light show. The new album will also be accompanied by a book, King’s Mouth: Immerse Heap Trip Fantasy Experience, which Coyne wrote and illustrated.
“The King’s Mouth immersive/child-like qualities are born from the same spark and womb as The Flaming Lips live performances,” Coyne said of the overall project. “The King’s Mouth adventure was made for humans of all sizes, ages, cultures, and religions.”
Along with prepping their new album, the Flaming Lips continue to release episodes of their retrospective podcast, The Sorcerer’s Orphan: A Song by Song History of the Flaming Lips. The latest episode is centered around the group’s 1994 alt-rock staple, “She Don’t Use Jelly.” Last year, the band released a massive greatest hits collection as well.
posted by derek brown - Mar 1, 2019 - 0 comments
THE FLAMING LIPS PERFORMANCE WITH THE COLORADO SYMPHONY FELT EPIC
Chris Walker
February 23, 2019
“There’s a fun part of the show tonight where it doesn’t have to go exactly how we said it would go,” declared Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne.
The band was only a couple songs into performing its 1999 album The Soft Bulletin with the Colorado Symphony at Boettcher Concert Hall on Friday night, and Coyne already seemed to sense how unique and special the evening was going to be, his declaration a sort of one-line manifesto promising that the show would be a capital “E” Experience.
It was.
While performing the entire track list of The Soft Bulletin, the Flaming Lips and the Colorado Symphony wove a musical tapestry in Boettcher Concert Hall. That tapestry was playful at times — such as when fifty-plus choral singers immersed themselves in the crowd, or when Coyne had everyone in the concert hall imitate the sounds of insects for the Lips’ song “Buggin" — and at other times incredibly moving to the point of making the musicians emotional...despite this being music the Flaming Lips have been playing for twenty years.
The Colorado Symphony deserves much of the credit, filling the room with lush accompaniment to the band’s psychedelic sound, with the percussionists and scores of string and brass players — not to mention the choir — making everything sound about ten times more epic.
And as Coyne pointed out during the show, “We’ve also got a conductor with the coolest fucking name: Christopher Dragon.”
Indeed, Dragon was fun to watch as he helmed the orchestral component of the evening's musical madness, appearing to have a strong rapport with the Colorado Symphony players in his fourth season as its associate conductor.
It also helped that Friday night was not the first time the Flaming Lips have performed The Soft Bulletin with the Colorado Symphony; the collaboration goes back to 2016, when the band teamed up with the orchestra to perform the album at Red Rocks Amphitheatre.
The Flaming Lips Performance With the Colorado Symphony Felt EpicEXPAND
As Westword learned at the time from the symphony’s chief artistic officer, Anthony Pierce, the idea came together after a chance encounter Pierce had with the Lips’ longtime manager, Scott Booker, at a music-industry conference in Denver years ago. That day, the two exchanged business cards on the off chance that they would ever want to work together.
Later, Pierce – who is part of an ongoing effort at the Colorado Symphony to broaden the organization’s audience through collaboration with contemporary musicians outside of the classical-music sphere – called the number on that business card to see how serious the Flaming Lips were about teaming up on a project.
The two groups decided on reimagining The Soft Bulletin in a live setting using their combined forces.
“And one of the things that [Flaming Lips bandmember] Steven Drozd told me was that if they had had an orchestra when recording the album, they would have used it," Pierce told us in 2016.
Of course, performing The Soft Bulletin at Red Rocks with the symphony would require entirely new sheet music and orchestral arrangements, because the album’s original string sounds were recorded using synthesizers and samples. So Pierce turned to another collaborator: Tom Hagerman of DeVotchKa, who offered to write the orchestral charts.
“And Tom [Hagerman] and I were in and out of Oklahoma City," Pierce recalled. “We spent a couple hours with [the Flaming Lips] before we were back on the plane and [Hagerman] started writing."
After that, the band and Hagerman exchanged sheet music and notes with each other using Dropbox, culminating in some mad-dash rehearsals and their performance at Red Rocks on May 26, 2016.
That outdoor show at the amphitheater may have had more spectacle, including a blow-up hamster ball and an octopus-like suit Coyne wore with LED tentacles, but this past Saturday’s show at Boettcher Hall certainly topped 2016’s show musically; with the well-balanced acoustics and more intimate setting at Boettcher, the band sounded more confident than it had during its previous outing with the Colorado Symphony.
The arrangements and execution on songs like “Waitin’ for a Superman,” “Feel Yourself Disintegrate” and (in the encore) “Do you Realize??” were tight and powerful to the point of inducing goosebumps.
The Flaming Lips Performance With the Colorado Symphony Felt EpicEXPAND
True to the Flaming Lips’ M.O., there was plenty of fun, too, including a blown-up robot that swayed from side to side during the other encore song, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1.”
But even the contrast between the band, whose bassist, Michael Ivins, was wearing an orange robe and LED glasses like some futuristic Shaolin monk, and the members of the symphony in their formal concert attire, somehow seemed perfectly natural.
Coyne repeatedly told the crowd how lucky he felt to be there and to perform with his fellow musicians on stage.
The crowd, giving at least a half-dozen standing ovations during the evening, felt similarly.
And for those who weren’t lucky enough to be there on Friday, the concert may end up being released as a DVD; Coyne told Westword’s Jon Solomon that the Flaming Lips hoped to edit together footage from the Boettcher Concert Hall show with footage that was taken during the 2016 Red Rocks show. If that film captures a fraction of the magic that was Friday's concert and the 2016 show at Red Rocks, it will be well worth viewing.
