It's Official: The Flaming Lips are Your Old Favorite Band

I distinctly recall my first exposure to the Flaming Lips: It involved orange hair, the words, "I know a guy," and a great deal of laughter. It later became one of Beavis' best music video rants (would someone tell Mike Judge that the videos were the best part of watching B&B? The episodes are just bare and peurile without them).

Somewhere 'twixt then and now, the Lips became America's answer to Radiohead, the kind of band whose every album meets with the kind of critical rhapsody that smells of the hungry sense of record-industry zeitgeist (I'm sorry, I meant "rebellion and creativity").

I'm basing all this on the fact that The Soft Bulletin occupies a Black Hole in my iPod: its density is the result of the thick faux-gravitas of the overarranged and excessive elements, not out of the layers and structure. I've been trying for near two years to attempt to figure out what's so mind-blowing about it, but I never get there because my mind keeps getting blown away by the desire to listen to "Canadian Idiot" again.

So when Filter decides that hey, the new FL disc is a return to form, full of "a grittier energy one would expect from a band just starting, as opposed to one in their third decade," let us say that I am sceptical. There's return to forms and there's return to forms. Is this going to be Beggar's Banquet or is it going to be Guero? Any artist is allowed to make a Guero every now and again, to go back to square one and pretend you haven't already written those songs. Beck had to do this so he could get to Modern Guilt. But since I never gave a damn about "She Don't Use Jelly," let alone any song from Yoshimi Hits to Death the Pink Mystics, or whatever, this particular return to form just sounds like a bunch of gueros doing the same thing.