THE FLAMING LIPS: Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends
Warner Bros. 69 minutes
Rating: 4.5/5

Few rock movies have shone a brighter light on a band than Fearless Freaks (2005), Brad Beesley’s documentary about The Flaming Lips’ late-coming rise to success. It isn’t fawning or sycophantic, but somehow makes the Oklahoma boys seem as worthy of recognition as any band of their generation.

Whether that’s true or not I can’t say. People tend to forget the sixteen years the Lips spent in various stages of (somewhat deserved) obscurity before the breakthrough of The Soft Bulletin (1999) or how their revered experiments, like splitting an album across four discs with Zaireeka (1997) or releasing a 24-hour-long “song”, are often (always?) more fun to think about than to actually engage with.


Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends ranks among their best tweaks of the album format. In sound and chronology it is very much a “new” Lips record, building clearly on the electro-pop (Yoshimi / At War With the Mystics) and psych-rock reviving (’09’s Embryonic) eras of recent memory. But it comes with a strange, envious roster of guests, including Ke$ha and Biz Markie (“2012”), Yoko Ono (“Do It!”) and Coldplay’s Chris Martin (“I Don’t Want You to Die”). For the most part these folks do not dominate the songs. They provide colour, and indirect inspiration (the Flaming Lips / Coldplay mash sounds very much like you would imagine it) for the band’s most relaxed and listenable album in a good ten years. The incredible “Children of the Moon” (with kindred spirits Tame Impala) is among the most beautiful tunes they’ve created.

All things considered this could have been a giant mess. The fact that’s it’s not only coherent but a blast to listen to shows how generous the Lips can be when their creative and pop sensibilities meet eye-to-eye.

SANTIGOLD: Master of My Make-Believe
Universal, 38 minutes
Rating: 4/5

I feel bad for Santigold’s publicist. The singer, born Sani White, has one of the slipperiest, least-marketable styles in pop music. Listening without context, you might imagine The Go-Go’s gone tropical. Overwhelmed by her stylish videos, you might assume an M.I.A. clone with good taste. She sits on the Atlantic roster but has persistently avoided a crossover hit, and shuns overt hip-hop influence despite a number of producers (Q-tip, Diplo, Switch) who would gladly help her out with that.

Any way you look at Santigold, you’re wrong. Her  greatest strength seems to be that rare ability to keep several steps ahead of an audience without losing sight of them. Master of My Make-Believe is, like her 2008 debut, unusually eclectic for a young singer but always rewarding. Opener “GO!”, featuring Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O, is like spy music wrapped tightly into an aerobic beat. “God From the Machine” is psychedelic and eerie, “This Isn’t Our Parade” sun-drenched and impossibly catchy.

White isn’t much of a presence vocally but compensates by pairing herself against an ever-shifting backdrop of sound. I’m sure this doesn’t do her any favours on the charts but makes for a far richer discography.

MARILYN MANSON: Born Villain
Dine Alone, 59 minutes

Rating: 2/5

Marilyn Manson is 43 years old, about 23 years past the point where anyone should be wearing monster makeup in public or writing bad poems about how the world is a hateful, Godless place. Much has been made of the singer’s supposed influence on violence in young people, but his actual crime might be leading them into a life of stunted, immature self-pity.

Born Villain, his eighth album, is about as good as his first, fourth, or sixth; in other words, not that much but just enough. There are moments of levity from the tired, clean-metal Manson style; the title track mixes acoustic guitar and hip-hop for a sound that is, by his standards, subtle and effectively menacing. The dank bass groove of “Murderers Are Getting Prettier Every Day” gets as close to actual heavy metal as Manson is likely to find himself at this point.

When I was a pre-teen I found Marilyn Manson terrifying, as did all the other kids who passed around his albums in the schoolyard. Now that I’ve discovered music that is actually scary – Wolf Eyes, Death Grips, even the fucking Pixies – revisiting his music is a strange and somewhat embarrassing experience.