The Flaming Lips

Rock has produced few stranger or more daring bands in the last 20 years than Oklahoma City's Flaming Lips, who embrace everything from merry prankster psychedelia to orchestral pop. At the outset, the Lips tried to bridge the seemingly insurmountable gap between Butthole Surfers-style dementia and bubblegum pop, with mixed results. Their early albums are jumbles of ideas, the weirdness genuine, the songs expansive and sometimes giddily incoherent. They're as much a response to hardcore punk's inflexible pithiness as to mainstream rock's polish.

With In a Priest Driven Ambulance, a coherent vision starts to peek through the chaos. It comes courtesy of an irony-free cover of the standard "(What a) Wonderful World," sung with wobbly conviction by Wayne Coyne. For all its disorienting ugliness and alienating strangeness, the world really is a wonderful place, the Lips insist -- an unfashionable stance that the band would continue to explore with increasingly plangent results.

The addition of guitar-effects maestro Ronald Jones and monster drummer Stephen Drozd gave Coyne the musical muscle to carry out his ambitions, and on Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, the Lips fashioned their first masterpiece: the Buttholes-bubblegum fusion fully realized in sing-along noise anthems such as "Turn It On" and "Be My Head," and the strangely poignant "Pilot Can at the Queer of God." Despite the fluke hit "She Don't Use Jelly," the album transcends novelty. Its multilayered production rewards headphone scrutiny and inspires head-banging, thanks to Drozd's John Bonham-like beats.

Clouds Taste Metallic is a similarly obtuse but fascinating attempt at making a pop album, while Zaireeka represents the Lips at their most indulgent. It's impractical -- a box set of four CDs designed to be played simultaneously -- and inspiring in its loony ambition. At its best, Zaireeka allows listeners to feel as through they're not just hearing the music but standing inside it.

The Soft Bulletin marks a turning point. Instead of clouding Coyne's vulnerability in weirdness, the ornate orchestrations heighten it. The album uses offbeat subject matter -- the dizziness caused by a head wound, a poisonous spider bite, two scientists competing to find the cure to a disease -- as a doorway to universal subjects such as failure, perseverance, and mortality. Coyne's lyrics display a newfound directness that is disarming, while the retooled lineup bypasses rock in favor of sumptuously arranged, ultra melodic grandeur.

On the surface, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is a return to the artfully conceived strangeness of the band's earlier work. Its cover image is a cartoon that depicts a tiny heroine facing off against a forbidding giant: a Power Puff girl versus Black Sabbath's "Iron Man," a not inaccurate simplification of the band's sound. There's a greater emphasis on computerized drumbeats and loops, with sometimes clumsy results. But there's no denying the emotional punch of the songs. Once again, Coyne strips away his emotional armor on "Do You Realize?," an anthem to transcending tragedy that suggests a cross between acoustic John Lennon and a Disney movie soundtrack. (Greg Kot)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide