Track Listing

1. Abandoned Hospital Ship
2. Psychiatric Explorations Of The Fetus With Needles
3. Placebo Headwound
4. This Here Giraffe
5. Brainville
6. Guy Who Got A Headache And Accidentally Saves The World
7. When You Smile
8. Kim's Watermelon Gun
9. They Punchured My Yolk
10. Lightning Strikes The Postman
11. Christmas At The Zoo
12. Evil Will Prevail
13. Bad Days

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41595 in Music
• Released on: 1995-09-25
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .21 pounds

Amazon.co.uk Review
The great thing about Flaming Lips' records is that each new one renders all its predecessors obsolete. Clouds Taste Metallic continues the fine Lips tradition of quantum improvement. It's an elaborately orchestrated masterwork of crashing cymbals, chiming bells, tinkling pianos, buzzing guitars, chirping birds, humming projectors, exploding cities, cheering crowds, and vocals stacked to the stratosphere. Each song goes gleefully over the top, but every ridiculous element somehow seems just right. While the carnival atmosphere and silly song titles distract you from band leader Wayne Coyne's serious ambition, the album's power bubbles up from hidden depths and eventually overwhelms you. The smoldering packages in "Lightning Strikes the Postman" and the sleeping millions dreaming about killing the boss in "Bad Days" are funny, but they're also unnerving, and the band builds a whole song out of the sad truth that "Evil Will Prevail". The sense that this isn't all just fun and games makes happier moments such as the cosmic orgasm of "When You Smile" sound like something much more than a hippie's wet dream. This album isn't music to take drugs to; it's the drug itself. --Tim Quirk

CD Description
CLOUDS TASTE METALLIC is the seventh Flaming Lips record, and it is a far looser and more relaxed affair than anything that preceded it. The weirdness flows out of head-Lip Wayne Coyne's head as it always has done, but this is a record by a band that no longer has anything to prove--not to themselves, their record label, nor their fans. They are content to just do want they want. With sparser instrumentation than before, Coyne's voice is both more intelligible and closer to the front of the mix, and the effects, though still present,are more restrained, used (for the most part) as frosting rather than cake.
Standouts on this record include the countrified slide guitar on "Placebo Headwound"; the genuinely sweet "This Here Giraffe", which comes complete with flutes and a xylophone and sounds like the theme to a particularly strange television show; "They Punctured My Yolk", which sounds bizarrely like a freaked-out version of "Seasons in the Sun"; and the supremely laid-back "Evil Will Prevail", with its gloriously swelling final verse. CLOUDS TASTE METALLIC is a nice record in the best sense of the word, and a good place to begin investigating the Lips.

Customer Reviews

a kaleidoscope
Ditching much of the rawness of previous works (telepathic surgery, hit to death...) the lips come up witha truely focused album that seems to be a natural predecseeor to the soft bulletin. Though far more guitar based than that excellent album it still shows a marked move towards a more organic sound. Excellent lyrics, excellent effects and indeed an excellent purchase for any lips fan.

A band that sounds like no other ...?
For all the hype (albeit deserved) that surrounded the Lips' last release, "The Soft Bulletin", this was their first great record, and remains their highest point so far. Having bought all their albums as they came out, one can clearly feel the evolution running through their records with the two previous works to "Clouds..." being lovable dress-rehearsals for this record.

It's often said, usually falsely, but "Clouds..." really is a record that sounds like no other. Dripping with heart-ache, paranoia, playful self-mocking humour and a large dose of plain weirdness, from start to finish "Clouds..." is one of the few classic albums of the 90's.
While "The Soft Bulletin" had a host of great moments it also lacks the complete soul of this record. "The Soft Bulletin" is a little more refined than "Clouds...", lacking as it does the skuzzy guitar and spine-tingling wild harmonies, but somehow it has less energy. From the gentle accoustic openings of "Braiville" to the amusing cataclysmic thrash of "Guy Who Got A Headache And Accidentally Saves The World", through the album's highpoint, "They Punctured My Yolk" (which comes across as the Beach Boys playing Spiritualized playing Suicide) up to the oddly comforting "Bad Days", the Lips' have created a record that comfortably sits alongside Suede's "Dog Man Star", REM's "Automatic For The People", the Manic's "Holy Bible", any Tindersticks or Low record and Kristin Hersh's "Hips And Makers" as a truly great record of the Second Movement of 20th Century Rock.

If you enjoy "The Soft Bulletin" then you're safe adding this to your CD collection. Ignore the one-star review above. This is as good as it gets.

Twisted pop masterwork from the always brilliant Flaming Lips.
By this stage in their career, The Lips had progressed from the lo-fi psychedelic slacker rock of early albums like Oh My Gawd! and In a Priest Driven Ambulance, into something of a loose pop band. 1991's major label debut, Hit to Death in the Future Head, and it's follow up, 1993's almost successful Transmissions from the Satellite Heart had seen the arrival of producer Dave Fridmann, as well as the on-going bombardment of revolving-door band members - incorporating early input from both Nathan Roberts and Jonathan Donahue - through to the more stable pairing of founding members Wayne Coyne and Michael Ivins, alongside their soon-to-become long-term collaborator Steven Drozd, and the introverted guitar wiz Ronald Jones. This line up would go on to create Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, and this, the twisted pop masterwork that is, Clouds Taste Metallic.

The most astounding thing about the album, for me at least, is the way in which everything just seems to work towards creating a unified whole; from the song titles and the subject matter (obsessions with space travel, science, superheroes, robots, love and death; which would all continue on the more successful albums to follow) to the overall use of instrumentation. Here, Coyne uses the acoustic guitar to flesh out the melody on a number of songs - which gives the album an individuality within the context of their discography - whilst Drozd and Fridmann add keyboards, distortion and all manner of bizarre little instrumental flourishes (including the sculpting of Jones's angular and distorted guitar riffs into a wave of atonal orchestration) to add atmosphere and counter melodies to really compliment the songs in a structural sense. Placebo Headwound, Kim's Watermelon Gun and Lightening Strikes the Postman do the whole surreal pop thing better than The Pixies ever did - with The Lips firing on all creative cylinders - with a great sense of rhythm and percussion, some wonderful production effects and Coyne's little-boy-lost vocals all adding to the overall pop quality of the songs as a whole.

Tracks like When You Smile, Kim's Watermelon Gun and Christmas at the Zoo seem more like children's songs run through the art pop blender, with Coyne singing of innocence and love in a world of uncertainty, as the band keep the whole insane pop vibe spinning to infinity, with Jones making some extraordinary noises with his guitar, Ivins keeping the bass work subtle (and even adding the odd stab of piano) and Drozd offering up some astounding drum fills (the ace rhythm section of Ivins and Drozd really gelling on songs like the aforementioned This Here Giraffe, Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles and one of my favourites of favourites, They Punctured My Yolk). Here, Coyne sings about rejection and redemption against the context of an ill-fated space mission, the bizarre descriptions coming close to poetry ("good bye, good bye / look as the clouds burst / they're growing taller / as your ship leaves in the distance / my world gets smaller"). Only Coyne could write a track about spacemen and make it sound like a love song... though given the fact that he's spent the last ten years making a film in his garage called 'Christmas on Mars', he probably means it!! Either way, there's no denying the creative scope of the band at this stage in their career... managing to turn in a record that uses strong melodies alongside forward-thinking instrumentation to tell an outrageous story that really, when distilled to its most simplistic formula, is all about finding love and acceptance within a world of apathy and confusion.

From this point on, the whole album is just a veritable pop Mecca, taking on the notion of a Pet Sounds for amateurs and elaborating on it - as the band set about crafting a collection of teenage symphonies to a junkyard dog (preferably one still floating in space) - whilst all around them the notes and bending and distorting, the vocals are fracturing on the high notes and the whole thing seems in danger of falling apart at any given moment. The fact that it doesn't, the fact that the band end up creating a piece of work that somehow seems more pure and heartfelt than anything Brian Wilson could produce, is a testament to The Lips as a creative unit.

For me, Clouds Taste Metallic is the defining moment for The Flaming Lips thus far. The record in which the mad exploration of the limits of a recording studio merged with something approaching proper song craft, giving way to a purity of vision and an intuitive understanding of what makes great pop. It's a lot less clean and professional sounding than their later pop masterwork The Soft Bulletin, but somehow remains the more enduring of the two. The beguiling beauty of the closing songs, Evil Will Prevail and Bad Days, which somehow finds a middle ground between The Beach Boys and country music - as Coyne strums an acoustic guitar while insisting "all your bad days will end" - is really quite beautiful and rather moving; particularly following the over complicated parade of wild imagery that spiralled out of Coyne's mad, kaleidoscopic songbook, during the preceding twelve tracks. For me, this is one of the few recorded masterworks of the 1990's... the one that no one bothered to buy.