Records: Flaming Lips' Zaireeka

By Dan Silk

Now I'm not gonna ramble on about how with electronica fast replacing rock and roll as the blah blah blah...but let's just say that in recent months, rock has been hanging its head over the toilet. Things have looked pretty bleak. Next big thing? Anything at all?

Well, the deserters can up and screw themselves, because Oklahoma's own Flaming Lips have given us an opera-thick slice of rock to believe in. The band's new record, Zaireeka, is an event, something to get excited about. It's a piece of art that makes me want to run into my suitemates' room, rip their covers off, and pour hot chocolate on their chests. Zaireeka is a mind-blowing statement of how big a record can be, consisting of eight songs and four CDs which must be played simultaneously. Yep.

Before we even get to the actual music on Zaireeka, there are some pressing cultural and conceptual issues. In an age when every third shoddy corporate record has a multimedia capability, every CD player has a five-disc changer, and even Weird Al gets a box set, what better way to answer all of these abominations than to sabotage them? Because no matter how many discs our self-satisfied Sony can fit up its ass, the company has yet to present a unit that can play two of them at the same time. And damnit, what's your first instinct when you buy any multi-disc set? Obviously you want to take it all in at once. With Zaireeka, you have to.

The idea is so inspired that it would almost make sense for the album to blow, just so there'd be no reason to go to the effort of actually listening to it. But I guess the Lips' Wayne Coyne figured that if his band was gonna do it, they might as well really do it. None of my impositions seem to matter to the Lips, as Wayne's liner notes insist upon mainly sonic motivations. (The album is based on a parking-lot event held by the band: 50 boom-boxes going at the same time. A similar tour is being booked as we speak.) Zaireeka is a proper Lips album, complete with the cozy, fireside melodies and spacy guitar twigs that fans have come to love. Coyne's lyrics remain bizarre bedtime stories; new topics include the "other world" of the menstrual period (in "A Machine in India"). The album is grander (obviously) than past efforts, with long, surround-sound symphonies, but it also has its share of good ol' rock songs.

The extra-stereo feature lives up to expectations. The sheer quantity of sounds on Zaireeka is stunning: sometimes the rate at which they move back and forth is akin to bullets ricocheting around a jungle gym. It's almost impossible to synchronize the discs, creating a watery, dreamlike effect in many of the songs and a flat-out confusing one during the mobile drum solo in "March of the Rotten Vegetables." The sixth song, "How Will We Know?" contains painfully high frequencies that insert themselves into your ears and saw open your brain. The liner notes warn us to make sure infants are out of listening range, and not to listen while driving. The weirdest thing, however, is that the CDs move in and out of sync with each other. Who woulda thunk it.

And who would've thought of Zaireeka but the Flaming Lips? The decade-old visionary band has flirted with fame since they played at Lollapalooza four years ago. Unjustly written off as a one-hit-wonder by people who have still probably only heard "She Don't Use Jelly," the Flaming Lips have finally put out a record big enough to maybe turn some new heads. The only problem is, it's sort of a pain in the ass to listen to.

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