I’m sure like many fans of The Flaming Lips, I first experienced The Terror through some guy’s shaky iPhone video filmed at this year’s South by Southwest Festival, where the Oklahoma five-piece premiered the record alongside a brand new womb-inspired stage production. Seeing Wayne Coyne cradling a Baby Born doll, wearing a futuristic umbilical cord suit, fiddling with the pedals and synthesizers at his feet wishing the video had better audio. Good news, The Terror has now arrived in recorded format and even without the Lips trademark avante-garde stage show, it’s a challenging and remarkable piece of art.
Listening to The Terror – the sixteenth record for the Lips – it’s clear that it is intended to be enjoyed in its entirety, not as individual tracks. Downloading this record from iTunes you’ll receive nine individual “shuffle-ready” tracks and one 55 minute long track. The latter is the only way you should be listening to this record! Tracks roll by in a haze of distortion accompanied by an undercurrent of pulsing synth, pumping life, like blood, through the whole record.
Due to the nature of the beast, it is really really difficult to pick stand-out tracks from The Terror. Opening track ‘Look… The Sun is Rising’ is a winner and the mercilessly long ‘You Lust’ is amazing if you can last more than 10 minutes with just a four note riff to sustain you for a lot of the time.
The truth is, this isn’t a record you can pop on in the car on the daily commute to work, nor is it something you would listen to to unwind after a long day or get pumped up for a night on the town. This is record is a real task. If you can get through it, good for you! I had a lot of trouble, but if you can listen to the whole thing from start to finish in one sitting, the reward is yours.
7/10
Reviewer: Amelia Parrott
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng-9vMA1moY