The label exec who's been pounding on Wayne Coyne's Dad's garage door to tell him and the other Lips that they've nabbed enough real world success now that they can stop being goofy and write more hits, has yet to be heard by the inhaitants inside. Top forty chart positions and Batman aside, there's nothing on Clouds Taste Metallic that sounds the least bit tainted by the fact that they may have made the racks at Wal-Mart.
On the outside, this all still sounds like a series of fragmented ruminations on the "Why Things Are" level - like a small clique of middle class adolescents, way stoned and mulling over things like the origins of a bag of candy orange slices. This is all sloppily pasted with Elmer's to an off-kilter, unmanicured sonic vision of the rock universe. In other words, it doesn't matter how Yes came up with all those complicated songs that suburbia is forced to redigest daily, this is as close as they'd care to come.
On the inside though, Clouds is wholly relevant to scores of future people - teen heads who hang out on Main Streets everywhere with shlocky dye jobs and MTV as their sole means of making sense of what possibility lies beyond their pre-fab existence back home. The cosmic pertinence therefore is not so much that being joyfully weird is a possibility, but the joyful possibilities that being weird can afford. There's only so much importance you can attach to growing up in today's America, if you can already map your existence full circle back to your parent's living room ethics.
So even without the tuneful catchiness of a "She Don't Use Jelly," The Lips shouldn't be dismissed as cartoonish alterna-rockers randomly musing into their microphones and driving haphazard melodies through their not necessarily well ajusted amplifiers. For all of the mild disorder built into the structure, Clouds is no "whatever sticks" venture.
By the time they get to their stride with "Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus With Needles," there's already serious otherworldliness afoot. It's the vibe that the post- partum Sonic Youth seem to latch onto less frequently - a spacey guitar line hovers in the background while up front while Steven Drozd drums, miked clean and mixed up high, create the naked tension down in front. Being track two, it's like the post launch high - a soaring feeling that if you're not sure about whether or not you should be here, the fact remains that it's a little too late to do otherwise.
When you land eleven tracks later, having waded through sleigh bells, projector noises, and assorted guitar wanderings, you realize the extent to which the Lips can and have traveled. With the "aurally excited version" of "Bad Days," Coyne (jokingly or not...) becomes the latest rock fellow to worship at the altar of the lost and demented surf God. The Brian Wilson-ness of the tune, filled with the wonder of buzzing guitars, is (again, jokingly or not...) undeniable. It comes off monumental, a blissful touchdown with off the cuff harmonies and toy marimba/xylophone flourishes.
Pushing any further examination away, Clouds is an aural continuum done in high Slurpee fashion - brightly coloured, middle fidelity confection that you know will hurt if you drink it too fast. But that's also essentially a major part of the fun, isn't it? "Where does space end?" indeed.
