This is an extraordinary album. I heard a track on John Peel, I can't remember which. It wasn't one of those I now recognise as the best tracks. But it was enough somehow to get me to buy it.
It was weird then that The Flaming Lips were on Warner. I assumed that the major labels were catching onto grunge just when it was over, and perhaps thought they were signing a grunge band. Thankfully The Flaming Lips were so much better than grunge.
You can see what's great about the album in the first part of the first song, starting with its tongue-in-cheek title Talkin' 'Bout the Smiling Deathporn Immortality Blues (Everyone Wants to Live Forever). There's enormous energy, there are the slowed-down ooh-wa-wa's, and a great tune. So many off-the-wall sound ideas, like electronic alarms used as percussion, and undermining the heavy riffing guitar in Frogs there's a prepared piano going mad. The 29-minute untitled piece at the end of the album is an amusing throwaway, that both satisfies the need to fill up a 70-minute CD while keeping the album-proper down to a digestible length. It's like a more brutal, digital version of Steve Reich's early tape works. You could listen to it all the way through, and I have, but not often.
I went to Toronto in October 1992, a few months after buying this album, and was very excited to find The Flaming Lips were supporting Throwing Muses at a venue on Queen Street West. They were terrible. They just turned up the amps and bluffed it. All the ideas were lost in the mix. I saw them again seven years later, and everything had changed, but that's another story. Although their later albums have got vastly more attention (and sales) than this one ever did, they've never done anything to match this in my view. The Flaming Lips now are more diffuse and not nearly as muscular as Hit to Death in the Future Head.
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