(None of those three bands’ first albums are much to shout about, but their sevenths, Clouds Taste Metallic, Yo La Tengo’s Electr-o-pura and GBV’s Bee Thousand, all released within little more than a year of one another, certainly are.) Each of those groups had catalysts that pushed them onto invigorated paths. The Flaming Lips were one of a handful of bands, including Yo La Tengo and Guided by Voices, for whom perseverance on different rock fringes in the 1980s finally paid off in creative renaissances, and at least marginally increasing record sales, in the 1990s. The back cover bears a photo of horizontal convective rolls that look like some kind of massive ten-fingered hand in the sky that is either waving or reaching out to grab you above the picture is scrawled “ these CLOUDS ARe REAL!! ” The Flaming Lips Clouds Taste Metallic, Warner Bros.
The album’s trippy title came from an anecdote about a guy they knew of who had actually tasted a cloud. Truth was starting to prove stranger than their affable acidhead fictions. It is neither their biggest selling nor their most critically acclaimed record, but it’s an inspired intersection where the end of the road meets the bridge to the future. In a sense, this might be the exact moment in which the Flaming Lips who wrote “Waitin’ for a Superman” and “Do You Realize?” were born.Ĭlouds Taste Metallic remains the most pivotal album in the Flaming Lips’ catalogue, in that it was the point where the first era of the band ended and the second era began. This “emotional thing” arrives in the third verse of the third song, “Placebo Headwound.” After pondering where outer space ends and why birds always fly south, two of life’s big and basic wonders, Coyne delivers the gut punch: “And if God hears all my questions/Well how come there’s never an answer?” The question, a heartbreaker for anyone who can relate, seems to drop out of nowhere and the rest of the band crashes in for the last chorus. We were starting to have a desire for that to drive us with our music.”
“As much as a song like “Psychiatric Exploration ” is fun, there’s not an emotional thing in it. “We were starting to get away from songs that were freaky but didn’t have any emotional content,” Lips ringleader Wayne Coyne told Spin in 2015 about Clouds. It was the serious depth that was starting to show underneath which was startling. Given the band’s long history of hallucinatory imagery, and the nature of their overdue breakout hit from a couple of years before, “She Don’t Use Jelly,” the whimsical bends were the predictable part of the Flaming Lips’ seventh album. VIDEO: The Flaming Lips “This Here Giraffe”ĭespite that recurring imagery, Clouds Taste Metallic doesn’t really play out as a critter concept album, though there is plenty of room within its rubber walls for God and all of her creatures. So committed was the band to this theme that they can be seen walking in front of the same giant “ZOO” sign in the videos for both “Christmas at the Zoo” and “This Here Giraffe.”
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The fauna fanaticism comes full circle toward the end with the celebration of “Christmas at the Zoo.” If this wasn’t the Flaming Lips’ own Pet Sounds, then it had to at least be their Animals. Within its first few songs, Clouds Taste Metallic paints a picture crammed full of cats, dogs, pigs, rats, bats, snakes, frogs, toads, gnats, cows, goats, roosters, bees, bugs, birds and, of course, this here giraffe. It may have also been meant in a more literal-minded way. Most likely the ad line wasn’t asserting that the Flaming Lips’ new LP was the best album of the ‘90s, since the decade was only halfway over, but was remarking on its ambition, color and hummable melodies. This was back when such listicles weren’t thrown together every other day, and, despite its numerous flaws, the MOJO list had an air of credibility, and its placement of the Beach Boys’ crowning achievement at the top was a fair conclusion. It seemed no coincidence of timing that MOJO magazine had just published their 100 Greatest Albums Ever Made issue only a month before, and Pet Sounds had come in at number one. The comparison was made either in a magazine adverti-sement, on a promo-tional card made for record store racks, or both, but memory clearly serves that some bright marketing spark claimed on its arrival in the early fall of 1995 that Clouds Taste Metallic was a Pet Sounds for the 1990s.
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