The title is Polish. It means Eyes of the Young and also refers to an imaginary drug (though who actually knows with the Flaming Lips?) that puts you to sleep for three months and cures all your ills (Want!)
“The drug uses your own sub-conscious memories and transports you to your perfect childhood happy mind and everyone has sex while riding unicorns,” explains frontman Wayne Coyne, perhaps the only person on the planet capable of turning this thought into a coherent album of indie rock.
Oczy Mlody is less sombre and introspective than The Terror (2013), with Stephen Drozd’s slow-tempo soundscapes recalling the more monged moments of the band’s masterpiece, The Soft Bulletin (1998); that pulsating, buzzing drifting-into-the-sun-in-a-malfunctioning-spaceship-but-OK-with-it vibe.
“Are you with us? Are you burning out?” Coyne asks on the searching How??, the cosmic angst offset by hilarious A$AP Rocky-style vocal effects.
The centrepiece, The Castle, is an infinitely sad meditation on a friend’s suicide. No band places hilarity so close to despair, fragility so close to harshness, sadness so close to exuberance.
Miley Cyrus — the band’s recent playmate — turns up on the final song, We a Family — which made a poignant Christmas number one in millions of alternate dimensions.
(Bella Union)
