Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The Flaming Lips: King’s Mouth

And I’d keep your kids away from the children’s book that accompanies the album

issue 10 August 2019

Grade: B-

So a queen dies as her giant baby is being born. The baby grows very big indeed and soon everything in the universe is inside his necessarily large head. One day he sacrifices himself to save his subjects from a deluge of snow. The townspeople cut off his head and preserve it in steel so that it will last for ever. Some of them climb inside his mouth to have a look around. They see thunderstorms and stars, apparently.

Exactly what you’d expect from another Flaming Lips concept album, I suppose, this time narrated by a bemused Mick Jones of the Clash. Everything else is in place, too — Wayne Coyne’s weedy and winsome falsetto, a gallimaufry of deranged Floydesque proggery, the occasional strummed acoustic guitar, lyrics pregnant with drug-induced meaninglessness, electronic beeps and farts and a portentous synthesised chorale backdrop which, in the end, really begins to grate.

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