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Let's start with a fact: this is the best Flaming Lips album.
Fans of the group have waited in vain for almost two decades to hear a record from our beloved freakout (yes, them!!!) from Oklahoma possessing the same monumental cohesiveness and, although they have followed the group's evolution, many have lost hope of witnessing the miracle repeat itself (incidentally, the new F.L. album, “At War With The Mystics”, is out these days).
In the midst of the pre-grunge explosion, the F.L. published their “difficult third album” which closed the circle of the '80s and definitively paved the way for the myriad of rock experimenters of the '90s (Motorpsycho being considered by many as the worthy successors of our work). As soon as the record starts, it kicks off with "Drug Machine in Heaven", something akin to mounting a Harley and sowing terror for two minutes on a pedestrian island on a quiet metropolitan Saturday afternoon. Pure Detroit sound tinged à la Barrett. It continues with "Right Now", one of those guitar riffs you never forget, a rhythm section that smashes: constant tension. The lyrics describe a state of psychedelic bewilderment, but to some, it seemed like an anti-militarist anthem.
At this point, someone reminds Michael it's time to get up, and he does it with a guitar solo that couldn't be more acid, Uncle Jimi permitting: just the time to fade out and Wayne Coyne's abrasive guitar attacks the most beautiful track on the album, that "Chrome Plated Suicide" that if you don't cry there, you might as well seriously consider suicide:
"If all my dreams were a tidal wave
And every day was Christmas
We could spend our lives in the drip
At the edge of the world
Cause love does things that you can't see
It's like telepathic surgery
And cuts and scrapes just like Iggy Pop thrown in a hole
If you take away my nerves
And leave just my words
Love would be the best thing in the world…".
Forgive me for quoting the lyrics, but I couldn't resist; for those who know the Flamin' it's no news that the lyrics are as beautiful as the music, and this track confirms what's been said. “Miracle on 42nd Street” and “Hell's Angel's Cracker Factory” are the most acid tracks on the album, and you just need to listen to them to understand the F.L.'s point of no return. “U. F. O. Story” begins as a studio chat among the musicians (incidentally, Michael Stipe is also mentioned...) and evolves into a noise pastiche that flows into the lyricism of a piano that no longer knows what to play beyond: it's difficult to find four notes with the same intensity in today's rock scene. Someone's run introduces us to “Redneck School of Technology”, another great rock demonstration by our guys, yes, just rock, sharp guitars, direct voices, dry rhythms, and even a harmonica. Priceless.
The last four songs could easily be part of a suite and add little (aside from a citation from Tchaikovsky's “Swan Lake”) to what has been previously heard but are indispensable because it's directly from these notes that the F.L. will take off for their subsequent albums. “Begs and Haching” is the worthy sublimation of the group's sound, raw and complete like every one of their performances. Finally, the applause, well-deserved.
In this masterpiece, you'll find echoes of every band that has graced the stage since the birth of rock 'n' roll: this album oozes tears, sweat, and blood from every single note and even from the silences. Many rock chroniclers declared “Telepathic Surgery” a concept album, and this definition would sound pompous for many bands of that period but, akin to other gems of the era, what's found in this album is the same attitude with which Sonic Youth, Pixies, and Hüsker Dü created “Daydream Nation”, “Surfer Rosa”, and “Warehouse: Songs and Stories”, each in their own way, all concept albums, albeit of a purely punk nature.
It's needless to add that "Telepathic Surgery" works after four decades, and, apocalypse permitting, no one will be able to take this album out of my personal top ten but, most importantly, no one will be able to heal the scars it has definitively opened in mine and who knows how many other freakout souls. Highly recommended.
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