The Flaming Lips
Oh My Gawd!

THE REVIEW

The Flaming Lips of the '80s were a band that, with the utmost ease, perhaps due to their perpetual lysergic state, managed to collide absolutely contrasting sounds, thus creating a fragile musical collage, perpetually on the brink of collapsing on itself. Just like fragile is the psyche under the effect of acid.

Oh My Gawd! is one of the few psychedelic pearls of its decade, as can be inferred from the cover.
The album is like an imaginary amusement park, where Coyne & co. enjoy giving out lollipops with an acidic aftertaste to all the children who enter. In the amusement park, one moves on a giant roller coaster, which soars to dizzying heights, only to descend abruptly, leaving us almost breathless.
This is the flow of the record, which alternates fragile guitar ballads traversed by psychedelic veins (Can't Exist, Thanks To You), where it seems like watching Syd Barrett strolling with his lollipop, to darker and more anguished moments (the acidic The Ceiling is Bending and Maximum Dream for Evil Knievel) where Wayne Coyne takes us to his haunted house to scare us a bit. And there are many scares taken while listening to the long One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning, with its alternating quiet piano and guitar phrases to fierce sonic assaults.
In the more cheerful moments, the pace is almost clownish and we find rockabilly rhythms contrasted with Pink Floydian instrumental intros (Prescription: Love) or punkish songs (Can't Stop the Spring) where the elephants from Fantasia make an appearance.

Unfortunately, since the beginning of the new decade, the Lips will migrate towards more reassuring pop territories, losing that peculiar (and unsettling) ability to blend the bubblegum imagery of American pop culture and the acid culture of the '60s. But just looking at the sneering face of the Wayne Coyne of today, it's clear our ride at the amusement park has ended, while he doesn't seem quite eager to leave.