The Flaming Lips have always been something like a sci-fi rock band, really. Even in their early days, when they recorded loud, noisy guitar rock, frontman Wayne Coyne was often singing stuff like “Used to be alright, but things got strange.” More recently, they went fill tilt: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was a cycle of songs about, well, a Japanese woman who fought salmon-coloured sentient machines.
So maybe it shouldn’t come as a giant surprise to hear that the Flaming Lips have recorded an entire EP inspired by Ender’s Game, a sci-fi flick about a kid who is engineered by the military to become a space general, fighting against some kind of alien menace, because let’s face it, what other kind of menace would you send a genetically engineered boy general to fight against?
I suppose the title character of the movie appealed to Coyne, whose singing throughout the album is alternately fragile and dark, often barely lacking any optimism. In his higher registers, he delivers lines like “It’s just a game, no one really dies,” over music I’d best describe as space-like. It’s echoey, full of otherworldly sounding keyboards and the drums, when they’re around, are usually pounding out a drum line-like snare beat.
Peace Sword is billed as an EP, but it’s a pretty lengthy one: six songs, five of them clocking in at over five minutes. One actually goes on for a full ten minutes. Altogether, it’s an overstuffed 36-minute EP (for comparison’s sake, the Ramones first album faded out after 29 minutes). Still, as of this writing, the EP’s going for five bucks on Amazon. On a per-minute basis, it’s a bargain! That’s about the only grounds for a recommendation, though.
Peace Swords opens with its title track . It’s kind of hazy and reminds me a lot of their Soft Bulletin period. Coyne’s lyrics sound weirdly cult-like: “I drain the sun of it’s light / open your heart to see.” Not quite sure what trip Coyne’s on, but maybe this has something do with a vast military operation against aliens? Or maybe he just got some bad kush?
The EP constantly has this odd feeling, like it was composed as a soundtrack of a sort (which it kinda was with the Ender’s Game producers only accepting the title track) . On “If They Move, Shoot ‘Em”, a quiet bass line and ambient keyboards slowly build up to a military style snare drum beat, the spooky sounds slowly multiplying as Coyne sings lines like “It’s just a game, no one really dies.”. God help me, this is some soundtracky shit.
Things don’t get better. On “Is Black At the End Good”, Coyne sounds as fragile as I can remember him: “everything changes / everything dies / I know, I know,” over a sparse backing; the drums don’t even kick in for a couple of minutes. “Everywhere that love is, that’s where I’ll be.” Maybe it’s the title, maybe it’s because Coyne keeps repeating the same few lines, but it sounds like end credit music. Meanwhile, “Think Like A Machine, Not A Boy” sounds like Damo Suzuki trying to record a country song: big swooping synths, then spacey, reverby acoustic guitar. “My mind has been poisoned by your lies,” moans Coyne. Maybe that explains this EP?
The only time everything comes together is on “Wolf Children”. There’s a steady keyboard groove and for once, the band is playing things straight. It’s not as good as their best from their full lengths – it’d be along the weaker songs on Embryonic – but next to the drifting flotsam here, it’s a gem. It’s too bad the playing overpowers Coyne’s singing: I can barely make him out sometimes.
My copy ends with a ten-minute song called “Assassin Beetle/The Dream Is Ending”. Weirdly, I’m not seeing this song on other versions. If your copy’s missing this one, don’t worry, you’re not missing much. For three minutes, it’s drums, little swoops of sound and echoes. When it finally starts doing something, it’s another example of Coyne repeating himself over keyboards. “The dream is ending,” over and over. By this point, I was hoping the EP was, too.
On the whole, I’m conflicted by this album. I’ve been a Lips fan for years, but “Wolf Children” aside, this one doesn’t do anything for me. I trust Coyne, Michael Ivins, Stephen Drozd, et al. enough to respect the inspiration behind this EP, but as a record, it rarely clicks. Instead, it feels like a mishmash of ideas repeated in song after song over some unfocused playing. Who’d have thunk recording a six-hour long song would lead to sloppy jamming?
I wonder if things are well in Lips-land. Their last album, The Terror, was pretty far-out even by their standards, and a planned collaboration with Keisha fell apart shortly before this EP’s release. What happened to the fun side of Coyne? The guy who snuck songs like “Thank You Jack White” into the back end of EPs and seemed like they were having fun on stage. Maybe he just needs to start watching better movies. Maybe an EP based around Blue Jasmine?
Rating: 2/5