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$ha, Chris Martin) and noise-rock extremists (Lightning Bolt), anarchic avant guardians (Nick Cave, Yoko Ono) and chilled-out indie new-schoolers (Bon Iver, Neon Indian), electronic experimentalists (Prefuse 73) and hip-hop heroes-cum-children's-television hosts (Biz Markie). Really, all you need to complete the picture is a Pauly D remix.
When the Lips started plotting these collaborations last year, they seemed like the latest in a growing line of guinea-pig projects that have kept the band busy since 2009's Embryonic, click-bait novelties to be filed alongside the six-hour songs and gummy-skull-encased USB sticks. And while the first of these pairings to surface-- EPs with Neon Indian, Lightning Bolt, Prefuse 73, and Yoko Ono, each represented here with a single track-- yielded interesting moments of aesthetic intersection, their free-form nature didn't exactly demand repeat listens. The songs on Heady Fwends are likewise rife with indicators of their hastily cobbled-together origins: flubbed vocal cues, songs obviously constructed via email file swaps (Ono's "Do It!"), goofy lyrics that sound like they were written seconds before recording ("You always want/ To shave my balls/ That ain't my trip"). But here's the craziest thing about the whole project: This piecemeal patchwork of tracks hangs together amazingly well as a front-to-back album-- to the point where, if the band had released this as the official follow-up to Embryonic, without the public stunt-casting campaign and Record Store Day tie-in, no Flaming Lips fan would feel short-changed.
If anything, Heady Fwends is arguably an even more wiggy experience than Embryonic, an album that marked the Lips' return to brain-bending, fuzz-covered psychedelia, but was still very much beholden to the record-collector canon of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Can. Heady Fwends immediately adopts a more sacrilegious tack. Not only do the Lips lead with their most unlikely and unapologetically obnoxious collaborator, Ke$ha, they let her run roughshod on a classic Stooges song: "2012" presents a mutant, robot-rock rewrite of "1969" that cranks up the original's Bo Diddley beat into an industrial-strength stomp and sees Ke$ha appropriating Iggy's "oh my and boo hoo" sneer as her own. But as chaotic and scatterbrained as the track is, it effectively sets the all-bets-are-off tenor of the record, and actually serves to introduce the predominant themes of science fiction and global apocalypse that run through many of the tracks here. And therein lies the key to approaching Heady Fwends: What at first seems rather silly actually proves to be quite purposeful.
The subsequent synth-smeared ballad "Ashes in the Air" further reinforces this logic, with Coyne offering an almost comically grave account of being chased by "robot dogs" through some post-war wasteland, while Justin Vernon echoes each line with his best Rick Moranis-doing-Michael McDonald. But then the song blossoms into a disarmingly elegiac chorus that makes the scorched-earth scene suddenly feel very real and despairing. Taken back-to-back, "2012" and "Ashes in the Air" provide a handy microcosm of the emotional extremes between which the Flaming Lips vacillate on Heady Fwends. Fortunately, the album's expert sequencing makes the shifts between the two poles feel natural, and puts tracks that wouldn't necessarily stand on their own to effective transitional use. The Prefuse 73 collab "Supermoon Made Me Want to Pee" doesn't amount to much more than three minutes of manic, percussive propulsion, but, coming between the epic, Edward Sharpe-assisted folk reverie "Helping the Retarded to Know God" and the sun-kissed Tame Impala tryst "Children of the Moon" (the purest pop song in the batch), it serves an adrenalizing role akin to the one "On the Run" plays on the Lips' favorite Pink Floyd album.
And you can thank Nick Cave for casting some of the Lips' previously released collaborations in a more favorable light: in the aftermath of the delightfully gonzo, Grinderman-in-space splatter of "You, Man? Human???", the Lightning Bolt-bolstered epic "I'm Working at NASA on Acid" assumes the mantle of Fwends' centerpiece track, with ominous acoustic-driven passages bookending an ecstatic, blast-off guitar jam that hearkens back to the Lips' In a Priest Driven Ambulance days. (The squelching, slow-motion Neon Indian entry "Is David Bowie Dying?" also feels much more dramatic in the context of Heady Fwends' more somber second act, rather than as the lead-off track to an EP.) But where most of the Heady Fwends collaborations up to this point have yielded outcomes where you can easily parse out what each party's bringing to the table, the late-game Erykah Badu appearance counts as the real revelation here. On their droning, distended 10-minute cover of the Ewan MacColl/Roberta Flack standard "The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face", the two entities blur into something nigh unrecognizable: The Lips' bombast is tempered into soothing gusts of distant distortion, while Badu's commanding presence is refashioned into that of a ghost communicating through a shortwave radio frequency.
This stunner is unfortunately answered by Fwends' one out-and-out dud, "Thunder Drops", a piece of spaced-out Bowie karaoke (courtesy of Polyphonic Spree/Lips sideman Daniel Huffman, aka New Fumes) that never achieves the lift-off its grandiose intro suggests. But Heady Fwends' comes to a peaceful conclusion with "I Don't Want You to Die", a mournful piano ballad boasting a liberal quote of John Lennon's "Imagine" and a tasteful, middle-eight assist from Chris Martin. With Coyne reverting back to the creaky, Neil Youngian croon he hasn't really adopted since the 90s, the song presents a fearful rumination of death that feels like the more vulnerable flipside to the life-affirming gospel of "Do You Realize??" But it's also a welcome reminder that, stripped of all their spectacle and high-concept strategies, the Flaming Lips can still win you over the same way they did 20 years ago, with a sweet, sad melody and simple, affecting sentiment. "I love the Flaming Lips," Martin blurts out in the recording's dying seconds-- and, really, that's the only thing on this surprisingly substantial album that feels obvious.
