By 1995, the post-Nevermind dream that any eccentric rock outfit could follow Nirvana’s path from indie outsiders to chart-toppling insurrectionaries was officially dead. The '90s mainstream would not be transformed in the image of the '80s underground after all, and, as it turned out, Sonic Youth weren’t festival-headliner material. By mid-decade, many artists pegged as the next Nirvana had either deliberately swerved from the spotlight or swung for the fences and whiffed, thus ensuring that no used-CD store was ever lacking for multiple copies of Exit the Dragon and Let Your Dim Light Shine.
For a moment there, the Flaming Lips seemed destined to join the also-rans. Released in the fall of 1995, Clouds Taste Metallic was the band’s seventh album, but the first to arrive with any commercial expectations. After a decade on the fringes, the Lips struck paydirt with 1993's Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, whose fluke hit single—"She Don’t Use Jelly"—drove album sales into the low six figures and earned the triple crown of '90s TV appearances. Understandably trying to capitalize on this momentum, the Lips loaded Clouds with more cheery and catchy songs about girls doing strange things with foodstuffs. But album sales floundered and, by the fall of 1996, reclusive guitarist Ronald Jones—whose swirling screech was so crucial to the two aforementioned records—had left the band, reportedly out of frustration with drummer Steven Drozd’s worsening heroin addiction.
Clouds Taste Metallic is the last album where the Flaming Lips just sounded like some oddballs from Oklahoma, before Wayne Coyne, Drozd, and bassist Michael Ivins refashioned themselves as studio scientists and transformed into the blood-splattered, laser-shooting, Miley-collaborating freak show that’s topped festival bills since the dawn of the millennium. But the record stands as the peak moment in a fantastic four-album run that began with 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance. It's a sturdy wood-paneled shrine to the band’s teenage rec-room touchstones, channeling the shortwave frequencies of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the fuzz-toned boogie of The Slide**r, the rustic splendor of After the Gold Rush, the thundering thrust of Houses of the Holy, and a Revolver-like balance of kid-friendly frivolity and strobe-lit freakery. Clouds' sad-eyed opener, "The Abandoned Hospital Ship", charts the Flaming Lips’ early '90s evolution in miniature: A creaky Coyne serenade (click-tracked by a wheezing film projector) gives way to a volcanic sludge-rock eruption, but the maelstrom is eventually smoothed over by merry church-bell chimes and swooning choral harmonies. It’s the musical manifestation of what would later become a common Lips lyrical motif—even in the midst of chaos, everything’s going to be okay.
Here, the Lips use distortion to exhilarate rather than annihilate: "Psychiatric Exploration of the Fetus With Needles" may rumble like a rocket launching out of your floor, but its perma-grin melody invites you along for the ride. Coyne and Jones’ guitar noise is infused with character and humor, like the spasmodic riffs that personify a patently absurd song like "Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World" or the buzzing surges that power "Lightning Strikes the Postman". And there’s also something reassuringly earthbound about their sound—amid the high-octane blast of "Kim’s Watermelon Gun", Jones drops in countrified fills like he’s plucking an electric banjo, while the cuteness of "Christmas at the Zoo" is kept in check by a George Harrison-style refrain that emulates the weepy tone of a pedal steel.
But if Clouds Taste Metallic pushes Coyne’s lyrical whimsy into overdrive, it also provides the first inklings of the more emotionally charged songwriting that would flourish on 1999’s orchestro-rock opus The Soft Bulletin. Rather than merely invoke outer-space imagery for trippy effect, stargazing songs like "Placebo Headwound" and "When You Smile" find Coyne simultaneously awed and humbled by his infinitesimal place in the cosmos. And the alternately rousing and defeatist "Evil Will Prevail" resonated all the more deeply in the aftermath of the April 1995 domestic-terrorist bombing in their native Oklahoma.
The songs that fill out this expanded three-disc 20th-anniversary edition—part of the band’s Heady Nuggs reissue series—likewise capture the Lips at their most down-to-earth, evincing an intimate charm that’s since been vanquished from the band’s increasingly futurist, high-concept music. Even though, post-Transmissions, the Lips were an MTV-approved major-label rock band touring with the likes of Tool, Stone Temple Pilots, and Candlebox, they were more spiritually in tune with the lo-fi pop and skewed, tape-manipulated psychedelia bubbling up from the American indie underground in the early '90s.
The wonderful 1994 EP Due to High Expectations… The Flaming Lips Are Providing Needles for Your Balloons (included here in its entirety) is anchored by an early, slightly scruffier version of future Clouds closer "Bad Days", but mostly imagines a parallel '90s where the Lips were signed to Drag City instead of Warner Bros. Woofer-blowing sing-alongs ("Jets Pt. 2") collide with honky-tonked Alan Vega revamps ("Ice Drummer"), shout-outs to a then-unknown Bill Callahan (via the live in-store performance of Smog’s "Chosen One") and impromptu Christmas carols ("Little Drummer Boy"). The Needles EP is supplemented here by corrosive covers of Bowie ("Life on Mars?"), Bolan ("Ballrooms of Mars"), Sinatra ("It Was a Very Good Year") and other ephemera, but collectively the bonus material reinforces the lo-fi maxim that a great song can withstand the most unforgiving production.
No song makes that case more persuasively than "Put the Waterbug in the Policeman’s Ear", a piano ballad that sounds like it was recorded into a dictaphone that is nonetheless one of the prettiest, most poignant songs in the Lips canon. It also serves as a reminder of a time when Flaming Lips songs required two-minute preambles from Coyne to explain their meaning (in this case, a half-true story about his stoned brother’s paranoid freak-out at a grocery store, and his imagined superhuman ability to telepathically summon insects to attack meddlesome cops). But where the post-Bulletin Lips thrived by translating serious songs into circus-sized spectacle, back in the mid-’90s, Coyne had a special gift for making the most outlandish concepts seem logical and oddly relatable.
Heady Nuggs’ third disc—a bootleg-quality document of a May 1996 show in Seattle—is hardly lacking for expository banter, though the real novelty is hearing the Lips rip through a set untethered to the ceremony and choreography that defines their shows today. It’s a grainy-but-radiant snapshot of the mid-'90s Lips live experience, and the performances—particularly the awesomely interstellar version of In a Priest Driven Ambulance’s "Take Meta Mars"—capture this version of the band at the peak of their brain-scrambling powers. (You may not be able to see the twinkling pinwheel Christmas lights that smothered their stages at the time, but you can more or less hear them.)
But a telling moment emerges from the epic distention of "Psychiatric Explorations" that closes the set proper. After stretching what was originally a three-minute song past the nine-minute mark (and seriously straining Coyne’s voice in the process), the Lips sputter out, and within months, their entire guitar-powered aesthetic would follow suit. Ronald Jones was gone just a few months later, and before year’s end, the band had turned into something else entirely. Compared to what followed, the Flaming Lips that made Clouds Taste Metallic were just a rock'n'roll band. But this reissue reminds us of what a uniquely wondrous and marvelous rock'n'roll band they were.
