The Flaming Lips - The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends Review

After you're done baking yourself into oblivion, make sure you wake up in time for 4/21, Record Store Day 2012. In time to get your paws on this: The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends, a double album pressed on two high-quality, multi-color vinyl discs housed in separate custom art jackets and poly bagged together. What exactly is it? Well for starters, check out the tracklist as it might serve as some motivation to set an alarm for tomorrow morning. Frontman Wayne Coyne gives us a walkthrough the vinyl experience and talks a lot about blood....full text Bon Iver, Coldplay's Chris Martin, and Ke$ha (yes, Ke$ha) score golden tickets to the Lips' sonic Wonka factory on this exclusive Record Store Day release. Their fresh influx of ideas on The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends creates new flavor profiles for the band's loopy psychedelic slurry: Ke$ha spews shards of sass over robot rocker ''2012'' and Martin's dreamy falsetto melts into the meditative dirge ''I Don't Want You to Die,'' while Bon Iver's ''Ashes in the Air'' casts its own woozy spell. Frontman Wayne Coyne remains a singular ringmaster, but here's proof that even mad geniuses need Fwends...full text Bono may be the archetype for the do-gooder rock star who wants to heal the world, but if any musician is going to broker peace in the Middle East, convince North Korea to deep-six its nukes, and get the original line-up of Guns N' Roses back together, it's Wayne Coyne. With the possible exception of Arcade Fire, everyone loves Wayne-- from the executives who've let the Flaming Lips follow their madcap muse on Warner Brothers' dime for 20 years now, to the Oklahoma legislators who named "Do You Realize??" the official state rock song, to Kevin Durant and the tall one from LMFAO.

On paper, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends-- a Record Store Day round-up of various collaborations conducted over the past year-- doesn't appear to be the next official chapter in the band's ever-evolving history so much as a tribute to Coyne's skills of diplomacy, like his hyperactive Twitter feed brought to life. The internet may have splintered the pop monoculture into myriad musical streams, but Heady Fwends provides as inclusive a congregation of the entire, circa-2012 under-to-overground spectrum as you can muster in a single album, with a guest list that spans top-40 stars (Ke$ha, Chris Martin) and noise-rock extremists (Lightning Bolt), anarchic avant guardians (Nick Cave, Yoko Ono) and chilled-out indie new-schoolers (Bon Iver, Neon Indian), electronic experimentalists (Prefuse 73) and hip-hop heroes-cum-children's-television hosts (Biz Markie). Really, all you need to complete the picture is a Pauly D remix....full text