a glowing chernobyley testament to everything wonderful and pure about the lips.

wonky, shonky, shoddy, shambolic, preposterous.  in the giant, puppet-fisted hands of anyone else, this would be an ugly mess of selfinduglent dribble.  with messrs drozd, coyne, salisbury and beesley it is still a mess but obviously a madly beautiful one.

i’m not sure if a budget and proper actors would have ruined the concept or delivered some delirious thing of wibbly genius.  probably the former but i’d love to see some abramovich-like benefactor fling some wonga at them to spunk up a wall.

all the usual flaming lips themes and imagery’s here – the magic and tragic, christmas, grim realism and childlike wonder, birth and eggs and foetuses, enlightenment, death and mortality, religion, science and medicine and surgery, aliens, psychedelia, psychiatry and dementia, head wounds… 

yr music / movie standards basically.

it’s a bit like their live show mixed in with the occasional head-and-retina-fuckerry of their videos.  and some attempt at narrative.

there’s something of eraserhead about the grainy aesthetics, similary constructed on the fly, on the cheap, over a number of years.  it looks like the kind of thing you could knock out yrself with a ton of patience and a ton of polystyrene and a few years worth of weekends.  which if fearless freaks is anything to go by, this is pretty much what happened.

there is however nothing of eraserhead’s bleakness in it’s lipsian (lipsian??) theme of hope and redemption.  it is, without meaning it in the pejorative, a proper old fashioned crimbo movie (shame i didn’t get the fucker till february) in that respect.  just one with bands of vagina-faced folk and songs entitled ‘the gleaming armament of marching genitalia’.

that it exists at all is a testament to one mans mad vision, and to the flaming lips general fuck it, switch it on and lets see what happens attitude.

and the soundtrack is wonderful; instrumental, combining into one heady startling noise the textured sound design of david lynch and the crazy sci-fi world of joe meek’s studio electronickery.  an awesome mixture of aural delights that is somehow identifiable as the flaming lips while being nothing like most of their recent recorded output.  it’ll be interesting to see what effect (if any i s’pose) this little foetus of a record’ll have on their next album proper.

• flaming lips: your spaceship comes from within