The Flaming Lips with Lightning Bolt EP (Lovely Sorts Of Death)

While not the most unlikely collaboration, and not to say that the results weren’t going to be cause for much curiosity, it is nearly unfathomable that someone out there was specifically clamoring for The Flaming Lips and Lightning Bolt to work together. And, for the most part, they don’t. Not really. There are four tracks but each band is just giving their interpretation of two tracks with the other group providing support. The record leads off with what is maybe the only real song on the release (not that anyone would usually get a Lightning Bolt record for normal song structure). Titled “I’m Working At NASA On Acid”, the track is America’s long-delayed answer to “Space Oddity,”. It works because the bands don’t really attempt to meld their styles at all. The song is 90% Lips with LB providing the sort-of boing moment that shifts narrators in Bowie‘s classic. After this, however, the quality of EP just falls off a cliff. LB’s version of the song, titled “NASA’s Final Acid Bath,” is unlike most of what we’re used to with them. They sound neutered. Even the mix is strange. The band’s main strength is the Gatling gun drumming of Brian Chippendale but it is buried beneath Brian Gibson’s atmospheric playing. While it is understood that they are trying to record a version of a song that is so outside of their regular milieu, it would have been preferred that they would have asserted themselves more.

The other song that each band takes a crack at is utter nonsense. It should be a hidden track. Really hidden, buried even. Again, a collaboration like this provides its participants a chance to do something different but this track, as well as its partner, doesn’t serve either band well in expanding its horizons. Wayne Coyne and company have proven countless times of their versatility but “I Want To Get High But I Don’t Want Brain Damage,” is nothing more than 4:46 of randomness narrated over this one silly line. The flip side version offers little difference. Not until the last 1:24 does Gibson really make his presence felt on the record. But without any drumming, there is no trace of the mayhem that Lightning Bolt brings to a recording. As an EP, this 12” would have been better off as a 7” split of the NASA tracks.