However, in contrast to their previous match-ups with Kesha and Miley, Musgraves serves more as a textural enhancement to the album’s fading-summer milieu, lending her dreamy wordless sighs to the instrumental “Watching the Lightbugs Glow” like someone familiar with the sight, and floating in the background of its companion track “Flowers of Neptune 6” as if beaming in harmonies from the afterlife. And for added authentic southern flavor, three tracks feature vocals from Kacey Musgraves, the latest pop star to get roped into the Lips’ supersonic circus. The barnyard sound effects and countrified breakdown of “You n Me Sellin’ Weed”-a folksy ode to young dealers in love-nod to the group’s more playful mid-’90s catalog, as do the dixie-glam guitar slides throughout the record that summon the spirit of the group’s former string-bender Ronald Jones. “Now, I see the sadness in the world,” Coyne sings on the latter track as the strings come in, “I’m sorry I didn’t see it before.” It’s a line that hits especially hard in 2020, when much of the world is both pining to go back to the way things were pre-COVID while having their eyes pried open to the social ills and inequalities that have been festering all along.īut American Head handles this heavy subject matter with a light touch, framing its stories in a magic-realist sunset atmosphere that lends even its gravest songs an earthbound charm. While these songs may be loosely based on incidents in Coyne’s past, they speak soundly to the country’s current condition, where working-class teens are still often forced to choose between the army, addiction, prison, or death. But as the album’s title suggests, these sorts of crises are endemic to the American psyche and perpetuate themselves for generations. On the equally crestfallen “Flowers of Neptune 6,” his old acid-eating pals are getting shipped off to war or thrown in jail on the moving orchestral centerpiece “Mother I’ve Taken LSD,” his youthful naivete turns to sorrow as he sings of an addict friend taken off to a psych ward and another on life support after a motorcycle crash. “What went wrong?/Now all your friends are gone,” Coyne sings on the album’s majestically melancholy opener, “Will You Return/When You Come Down,” and as American Head plays out, that absence takes many forms. (And while it’s not an explicitly autobiographical work, tellingly, one of its doomed characters is also named Tommy.) Though not a narrative concept album per se, each song feels like a vignette from some tragic sequel to Dazed and Confused, where carefree teenage kicks have given way to the unforgiving realities of young adulthood. American Head feels like it was born from this moment of innocence lost. In the 2005 band documentary The Fearless Freaks, we see old home-movie footage of Coyne and his brothers enjoying a typical ’70s all-American adolescence, playing pick-up football with the local longhairs, before a darker narrative emerges-specifically of the drug habit that would land his brother Tommy in and out of prison. Instead of tunes about killer robots and unicorns with purple eyes, we get songs about people working in slaughterhouses and slinging coke on the side to get by, fond teenage memories of taking quaaludes and frightening recollections of trying LSD, and dramatizations of actual traumatic incidents from Coyne’s early years. Likewise, Coyne approaches his favorite topics-love, drugs, and death-from a less existential, more personal vantage, grounding his narratives in more naturalistic settings. American Head retains some of the symphonic sweep of the Soft Bulletin era and the freaky futurism of their post- Embryonic state, but, at its core, we find the band rekindling their past romance with Neil Young’s piano ballads, the Beatles’ psychedelic guitar tones, and Bowie’s stargazing anthems. From that anecdote, Coyne and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd envisioned American Head as a work of speculative fiction, reimagining the Lips as the sort of drugged-out local Oklahoman rock band that might’ve hung out and jammed with a pre-fame Petty while he was passing through town.Īs it turns out, that mythical ‘70s scenario is really just a roundabout way of getting the Lips back to where they were in the ‘90s. After revisiting the Tom Petty documentary Runnin’ Down A Dream following the rock legend’s 2017 death, Lips ringleader Wayne Coyne became fixated with the story of Petty’s pre-Heartbreakers band, Mudcrutch, with whom Petty spent time in Tulsa in the early-’70s en route to L.A. In sharp contrast to the Lips’ recent adventures in fairytale fantasias, American Head finds its inspiration in an arcane piece of Oklahoma musical lore.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |