"Terror" An Affecting Experiment in Fear

The long and storied history of the Flaming Lips can be divided into two halves: before-“The Soft Bulletin” and after-“The Soft Bulletin.” Their 1997 release marked the beginnings of mainstream success as the experimental rock group turned to space rock and noise pop in “Soft Bulletin” and “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.” In 2006, “At War with the Mystics” only further muddled the the band’s sound world, and the release of “Embryonic” three years later brought a new, sinister dimension to the Lips’ canon, slipping hints of fatalistic malevolence into sci-fi themes. Given their sprawling discography, the first question that must be raised with the Lips’ latest release is: what exactly is it? Although “The Terror” carries much of the experimental flavor of their previous releases, the Lips connect with something much more primal on their latest release: the emotion of fear itself.

Fully abandoning the Lips’ brief affair with noise pop, the first track off of “The Terror” is expansively symphonic. “Look… The Sun Is Rising” is a tone poem disguised as a song, with even the cutting, simple lyrics and Wayne Coyne’s vaporous vocals contributing to the mixture. Against a mosaic of wispy synthesizers, aggressive guitars, and an explosive drum machine, Coyne croons portentously, “Love is always something, something you should fear / When you really listen, fear is all you hear.” Like the rest of the album, “Look… The Sun Is Rising” is lyrically reminiscent of the Lips’ concept material, and the unsettling opener quickly establishes a menacing palette for the rest of “The Terror.”

As the album develops, the tracks become more opaque and, at times, completely impalpable. The Lips cultivate an impersonal, synthetic sound, never coming close to sounding like a rock band. The broken-record effect created by the repetitive, stop-and-go pattern of the synthesizers on tracks like the amorphous “You Are Alone” creates a sterile, almost lifeless landscape eroded by synthesized wind and structured only by a mechanical drum beat. Even the more rhythmic tracks like “Butterfly, How Long It Takes To Die” don’t feel driven, but rather governed by methodical machinery, like a clock in an empty room counting down to some ominous end.

This persistently unerring sound is often coupled with mysteriously pithy lyrics. On “Try To Explain,” the track that comes closest to being a love song, Coyne sings, “A love that explodes, convulsing your body / Your only hand extending in the deep.” “Be Free, A Way” is a shadow of “Look… The Sun Is Rising,” pulsing at the same frequency but more calmly and composedly. The lyrics mirror those of the previous track, inquiring, “Is love the God that we control / to try to trust the pain?” In fact, the album is full of such questioning and, outside of the first track, nothing seems to resolve with any clarity. Fittingly, the chorus of “You Are Alone” is simply the repetition of “You’re not alone / You are alone,” which, instead of being vapid, adds to the uncomfortably fantastic mystique of “The Terror.”

The masterwork of the album is “You Lust,” a track that spins like a cosmic sphere for 13 minutes before transforming suddenly into an icy still-life. One of the only tracks on the album that features a self-aware narrator, “You Lust” becomes the voice of reason in a distorted world, struggling at the mercy of a malevolent higher power. “You’ve got a lot of nerve / A lot of nerve to fuck with me,” begins Coyne indignantly, only to later resign to his fate as he declares, “When you pull the switch on us, I don’t really want to know.” Despite the nebulous nature of “The Terror,” its nine tracks are thematically linked. It is on “You Lust” that this theme is elucidated: “I began to understand it, myself,” a garbled female voice reports near the track’s end before disappearing into a blanket of synthesized bliss. Perhaps what is most terrifying isn’t the knowledge of something horrible, but the emptiness of not knowing anything at all.

By this point on the album, the true nature of “The Terror” is laid bare before us: this album isn’t the concept album that “Yoshimi” was, nor the collection of space-pop tracks that was “Soft Bulletin,” nor the strange experiment that was “Zaireeka.” Instead, “The Terror” is the Flaming Lips’ attempt to explore a pure emotion. Their emotion of choice—fear—feels strangely at home in the metallic, uneasy synthesizers that swamp the album. For such an endeavor, however, “The Terror” unfortunately leaves us with little resolution. The final track, “Always There, In Our Hearts,” serves as an eerie and disturbing coronation, a bleakly despondent summary that does little more than reiterate the disheartened themes of internalized evil.

“The Terror” succeeds precisely because it revels in what are normally musical downfalls. An emotionally removed sound, repetitive instrumentals, and simple lyrics only help set the album in a foreign, threatening atmosphere. Though other bands may buckle under the weight of devoting an entire album to a specific sentiment, the Flaming Lips refuse to shy away. “The Terror” is a journey into our own hearts, an album embedded in the primal fear of the unknown and unfamiliar.

—Staff writer Se-Ho B. Kim can be reached at sehokim@college.harvard.edu.