★★★★★
Warner Brothers After heading to the dark side of the band's psychedelic musical palette on 2009's spectacular Embryonic The Flaming Lips fine-tuned the expansive ideas from that set into a hypnotic combination that's part freak flag flying and part ominous bad tripping. Early in 2013, the members released The Terror, which moved into laidback, spaced out territory. Coming out later in the year, the six-song, 36-minute EP Peace Sword condenses what's worked on previous albums...
- www.jambands.com
2014-01-13
★★★★★
The Flaming Lips have been in a strange place these last few years. After the critical shine waned a bit following their Soft Bulletin/Yoshimi two-punch, their gritty 2009 effort Embryonic was a welcome return to their freakout roots, but what followed since then, while exciting at first, showed that after ringleader Wayne Coyne got a taste of unlimited creative freedom, he neglected to find an editor that would keep his band in check. Gummy Skulls turned into Chocolate Skulls...
- www.popmatters.com
2013-12-06
★★★★★
The Flaming Lips, in all their trippy, confetti-laden glory, are the perfect band to score a sci-fi film. It makes sense, then, that the band's latest EP, Peace Sword, was inspired by the famed novel Ender's Game and its recent film adaptation. Lead single "Peace Sword (Open Your Heart)," which features Thomas Fec of Black Moth Super Rainbow, was written exclusively for the movie, and the five complementary tracks highlight the band's penchant for the supernatural and extraterrestrial...
- www.pastemagazine.com
2013-12-04
★★★★★
Tweet Vast Space For a man who's yet to even read the Orson Scott Card novel, Wayne Coyne sure has a lot to say about Ender's Game. The Flaming Lips turned their sole song contribution for the movie's soundtrack into an entire EP, waxing poetic on par in scope with the fate of civilization. Sweeping orchestrations mirror composer Steve Jablonsky's arrangements as the eponymous "Peace Sword (Open Your Heart)" slowly comes alive...
- www.mxdwn.com
2013-12-03
★★★★★
This six-song EP sounds like a warm cocoon shedding itself. The title track - a very Lips-ish slice of made-of-stars melody and Wayne Coyne's voice multitracked to infinity - was written for the film version of the classic science-fiction novel Ender's Game. But since no prog act worth its stash turns down a chance to be inspired by sci-fi, the Lips secreted five more clouds - tunes "inspired by" the movie, including the vaguely martial "If They Move, Shoot 'Em" and the wonderfully titled...
- www.rollingstone.com
2013-11-19
★★★★★
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...
- pitchfork.com
2013-10-30
★★★★★
If there is one thing The Flaming Lips do better than most--even more so than the hallucinogenic sound quality of their records, more than the jubilant sonic surprises generating synaptic fireworks in your skull--it is album composition. The Terror, the Lips' 13th album, is sequenced so beautifully, the tones and dreadful cadences escalate so calmly and surely, that one is lulled along gently, but with a sustaining, horrific heartbeat that never flags...
- filtermagazine.com
2013-05-18
★★★★★
Concept albums and any kind of rock music invoking the word 'opera' are like Terrence Malick films: you know a good ones exist but even the slightest miscalculation and you will find yourself mired in a turgid swamp of self-indulgent dribble. I don't care if Tommy was innovative, it is boring as hell and not all ground needs breaking. Expansive works and grand statements benefit from wisdom and wisdom cannot be accumulated rapidly...
- www.undertheradar.co.nz
2013-06-26
★★★★★
Sonic brutality and lashings of existential dread! Even by the quixotic standards of The Flaming Lips, The Terror is a strange affair, musically as prickly and uncomfortable as anything you'll hear this year, and so wracked with dread and disillusion that it's virtually challenging you to actively dislike it. At every turn, Wayne Coyne seems to want to disabuse the listener of any comforting or uplifting notions. In the opening track "Look.....
- www.uncut.co.uk
2013-05-10
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