I don’t know why the Flaming Lips are so obsessed by re-doing classic albums, but after Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, the Oklahoma band has decided to rerecord King Crimson’s ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’… yeah nothing scares them, you would have thought the Pink Floyd’s album was already untouchable, but now they undertake another risky task. However, I definitively can see why they have chosen this album, doesn’t the title song already sound like a Lips’ tune with this bombast chorus?
Actually they didn’t do this alone, they directly contributed to only one song and hired a long list of collaborators such as new Fumes, Linear Downfall, Spaceface, Stardeath and White Dwarfs (the band of Wayne Coyne’s nephew),… one song? So this is barely a Flaming Lips’ album! This is what was posted on fans’ site the Futureheart:
‘New Fumes, Linear Downfall, Stardeath and White Dwarfs, Spaceface and The Flaming Lips’ collaborative remake of “In the Court of the Crimson King” is available now on limited edition multi-color vinyl at Dallas’ Good Records and will sell online and at more indie record shops in the near future. Titled “Playing Hide and Seek with the Ghosts of Dawn,” this new version of King Crimson’s debut LP is also streaming in full at The Lips’ satelliteheartradio.com. ‘
Each multi-color vinyl is one of a kind design, hand-made by Fumes, and indeed, you can stream the whole thing here; of course it’s a total new entity, the flutes are gone, replaced by electronics and distortion, surrounded by chaos and cacophony! Purists are gonna complain, but what would be the point to reproduce the same album note by note?
When he talked to Clash Music, Coyne described King Crimson's music as ‘music from another dimension’, adding, ‘When I say 'psychedelic' that's what I mean: something bad is lurking as well – we're not just free to be ourselves. Once we become ourselves there's some danger lurking, there's some fear … We don't always want to know when we turn a corner what's going to happen there.’
If you don't like it, prepare for more, as according to the Futureheart website this is not the end of it, and more classic albums will follow.
Meanwhile the Flaming Lips are preparing the release of their real new album entitled ‘The Terror’,… intriguing title? But you may remember about multi-instrumentalist Steven Drodz’s sudden disease in 2010, which forced them to cancel a few concerts. Well, it seems that he was once again fighting a bad substance addiction, and the album, which Wayne Coyne described as ‘possibly the best Flaming Lips record ever made’, may well be seriously tainted by this sad episode. Last August, Wayne Coyne described the process of this album as ‘finding an answer’. I can’t wait, as I really need answers.