If there’s been one constant in The Flaming Lips’ careening four-decade evolution from Okie goth-punk weirdos to festival-conquering freak show, it’s that Wayne Coyne loves to tell a story. Back on 1989’s Telepathic Surgery, he hit pause on the album’s acid-fried garage rock to relate a childhood encounter with UFOs. Throughout the ’90s, he specialized in the sort of musical tall tales (”Put the Waterbug in the Policeman’s Ear,” “The Big Ol’ Bug Is the New Baby Now”) that required narrative exposition nearly as long as the tunes they were teeing up. And even as he started writing more serious songs about humans with wives and children, he was just as likely to dress up heavy themes in fantastical yarns about fighting droids and killer mechanized canines.
But, oddly enough for a Pink Floyd-worshipping band that’s introduced us to enough colorful characters to fill several Lewis Carroll novels, the Flaming Lips have never released a proper, front-to-back narrative song cycle. (A handful of robot-populated tunes on Yoshimi doesn’t quite count.) And their first attempt at such, King’s Mouth, arrives with muted fanfare, falling somewhere between a proper Lips studio album and one of their many extracurricular novelty releases.
King’s Mouth was initially conceived as the soundtrack to a synchronized light-art installation—or rather, an “immersive head-trip fantasy experience”—staged by Coyne. (This is, of course, is what the viewing chamber looked like.) It was then developed into a 12-song storybook album that was released in a limited-vinyl run last April on Record Store Day. Like many of the projects the Lips have debuted on RSD, it boasts some inspired celebrity stunt-casting: The album is narrated by The Clash’s Mick Jones, who delivers the particulars of its outlandish plot with the tone of a kindly old granddad.
I’m not really spoiling anything by telling you King’s Mouth is about a royal baby born to a queen mother who perishes during labor, presumably because the kid has an abnormally massive noggin, which is put to effective use when he saves his city from an avalanche by devouring the universe whole with his giant chompers only to die in the process, after which his followers chop off his head and live inside of it for all utopian eternity. Ultimately, it’s just an elaborate ruse for Coyne to lean into his favorite topics once again——the fragility of life, the inevitability of death, the perseverance of the human spirit, the inexplicable wonders of the universe. Likewise, King’s Mouth is a musical patchwork of familiar Lips flourishes: the operatic exultations of The Soft Bulletin, the campfire electro of Yoshimi, the glitchy textures and simple, sanguine balladry of Oczy Mlody. But the pieces don’t always come together in a satisfying way—scene-setting track “The Sparrow” aims for the multi-sectional splendor of past triumphs like “The Spark That Bled,” but feels too fragmented to take flight.
That song provides an early indication that King’s Mouth is not the sort of album you’ll be stripping for playlists—only the winsome acoustic sing-along “How Many Times” functions as a stand-alone track. But as far as concept albums about magical, abnormally sized severed heads go, King’s Mouth is a breezy listen. And at 42 minutes, it’s also the Lips’ shortest album since 1992’s Hit to Death in the Future Head.
More than simply reaffirming the Lips’ flair for bizarro storylines, King’s Mouth reminds us that Coyne can draw poignancy and pathos from the strangest sources. On King’s Mouth he voices the title character’s inner thoughts from birth to afterlife, steering the cosmic lullaby “Giant Baby” from Jones’ quizzical observations about the difficulties of sourcing oversized toys into a somber rumination on losing a parent. In moments like these, King’s Mouth may seem a touch too dark to replace Goodnight Moon or Each Peach Pear Plum as an evening storytime staple. But by reimagining the weighty concept record as light, escapist entertainment, King’s Mouth is as strong a candidate as any for Baby’s First Prog Album.
Buy: Rough Trade
