The video for the Flaming Lips’ thundering 1999 single “Race for the Prize” appropriately features someone in the midst of a race, a physical emblem of the song's overwhelmed scientists who are working around the clock to develop a cure for some fatal disease. But since the release of that video—and the game-changing album from which it sprung, The Soft Bulletin—that long-distance runner could very well represent the average Flaming Lips fan: Since dramatically shifting aesthetic chorus at the top of the millenium, the Lips have been a hard band to keep up with, indulging us in both the thrill of the chase and the exhaustion that inevitably results from it.
Even as they’ve entered their fourth decade of existence, the band has become more outrageously prolific with each passing year, as the expediency of the internet age—combined with the band’s inherent resourcefulness—has allowed them to document and release their every passing whim, and seemingly record with every artist they’ve ever posed with for a backstage festival selfie. The band’s unforgivably bleak 13th album, The Terror, had barely settled onto record shelves last April when we received word of an upcoming full-album tryst with Ke$ha, and even that’s since been superseded by a just-announced, imminent split-release with Tame Impala. We’re at the point now where the Lips’ proper records feel less like a cumulative elaboration of their interim activities than a respite from them.
But even for a band that’s experimented with every type of release format—from simultaneously played quadruple-CD sets to USB singles encased in foodstuffs to songs that require you to book a day off work to listen to—the Peace Sword EP holds a unique place among the Lips’ sprawling discography. The Lips have sporadically released EPs before, but—outside of their unrecognizably garage-grimed 1984 debut—they’ve usually taken the form of intra-band collaborations or an official single padded out with covers, demos, and other novelties (not to mention some canonical lost gems). But Peace Sword is something else: a holistic six-song release that, at 36 minutes, basically counts as the second full-length album the Flaming Lips have released in 2013.
The EP originated as another one of the Lips’ one-off larks: they were asked to contribute to the soundtrack of the upcoming science-fiction epic Ender’s Game (adapted from the 1985 novel by Orson Scott Card), and while lead-off track “Peace Sword (Open Your Heart)” will appear in the film, the EP is fleshed out by songs that were inspired by the movie but were rejected by its makers. Of course, a film set in a future where humanity can only be saved from alien-wrought extinction by a humble hero is hardly a thematic stretch for the Flaming Lips; of the two albums the band has released this year, one opens with the lyric, “There’s a little spaceship/ hiding in the clouds,” and it’s not even the one that was commissioned for a sci-fi flick. But if Peace Sword carries over The Terror’s dystopian chill, synth-smeared mistiness, and emotional fragility, it’s informed as much by another Lips experiment from earlier this spring: their full-album remount of 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots at South by Southwest.
The two albums represent the yin and yang of the Lips’ post-millennial catalogue: both are informed by the uncertainty of the future, but where The Terror translates that into anxiety and despair, Yoshimi is more playful and optimistic. *Peace Sword—much like Ender's Game itself—*is thus a proverbial fight test, the space where the Lips’ light and dark energies square off in battle, sometimes within the same song. “Peace Sword (Open Your Heart)” oozes forth with such kaleidoscopic splendor, you can practically feel the multi-coloured balloons bounce off your head, but as Coyne repeats that deceptively optimistic parenthetical refrain, the song undergoes a slow decay: the drum beat starts sputtering out, the background symphonic-synth fuzz becomes blindingly overpowering, and the overall mood turns from celebratory to sorrowful. However, the lush, decadanse ballad “Is the Black at the End Good", works the other way, with Coyne’s stark, self-doubting verses blossoming into a resplendent, arm-swaying chorus that renders the Lips’ recent half-baked Terror bonus-cut cover of “All You Need Is Love” all the more superfluous. (And, intentionally or not, the song’s all-inclusive, hippy-dippy sentiment—“everywhere where love is/ that’s where I will be”—feels like an especially subversive affront to Orson Scott Card’s notoriously ultra-conservative views on gay marriage.)
In light of The Terror and its equally unnerving predecessor Embryonic, it’s been a while since we’ve heard the Lips sound so guilelessly heartfelt and anthemic as they do here; with its acoustic strums smothered in ersatz, synthetic orchestration, “Think Like a Machine, Not a Boy” plays like a “Do You Realize?” in lysergic slow motion, granting Coyne more time to savor “the beauty that surrounds me.” In contrast to these surprising moments of radiance, Peace Sword’s more downcast material feels less revelatory. “If They Move, Shoot ‘Em” (not to be confused with Primal Scream’s “If They Move, Kill ‘Em”) is essentially a spin-off of the Terror highlight “Butterfly, How Long It Takes to Die", though it does boast an equally compelling, climatic build-up over a hypnotically stuttering drum break. However, the repetitious prog-funk creeper “Wolf Children” falls flat, and the 11-minute finale “Assassin Beetle – The Dream Is Ending” tries to stitch together instrumental and lyrical motifs from throughout the EP into an ominous closing suite, but its mounting lurch to the finish is too dreary to feel dramatic. “The dream is ending,” Coyne gravely intones throughout the piece’s chilliest stretch, suggesting that, in this war over control of the Flaming Lips' psyche, evil has prevailed. But the triumph of Peace Sword is not so much in the outcome, but the valiant battles fought along the way.
