The Flaming Lips – Peace Sword EP

One question hanging heavy over the heads of Flaming Lips fans after the release of 2013’s abyssal The Terror was: where do they go next? It’s certainly difficult to imagine how the band picked themselves up, having plunged the depths of human despair to make an album so unremittingly bleak as their last LP proper. The answer though, comes in the shape of new EP, Peace Sword.

Commissioned to write a track for the sci-fi movie Ender’s Game, Wayne Coyne and his band of madcap oddballs went about things with their erstwhile trademark zaniness. Returning to the producers with not one silver-screen-primed digestible track, but a thirty-six minute thematic exploration of the source novel’s expanded universe, the band were shown the door. Thankfully, the songs are now given an audience.

The doomy bluster of The Terror is immediately shooed away by the sprightly swirls of opener “Peace Sword (Open Your Heart)” – the only track that made it to celluloid. With its anthemic refrain “Open your heart to me”, the Lips are at their most life-affirming since 2006’s At War With The Mystics.

Of course, anxiety isn’t absent here; this is the same band whose biggest hit is a celebration of romance in the face of certain death (cf. “Do You Realize??”). “If They Move, Shoot Em” splutters into life with nervy syncopated percussion rolls as Coyne’s saccharine-tinged vocals murmur about the mix: “And you’ll start to notice/ that their screams can’t hide/ as they’re taken over by the fear”.

However, the navel-gazing starkness doesn’t hang too thick. From the giddily prancing synths on “Wolf Children” to the redemptive “Think Like A Machine, Not A Boy”, the Lips juxtapose any darkness with a kindly smattering of light.

Album closer, the ten-minute “Assassin Beetle – The Dream Is Ending” begins as a percussive but sparse smorgasbord of sirens and warbles, before morphing into a sonic afterglow as Coyne coos that ‘the dream is ending’. It’s a dream that does end a little soon; the truncated length of the EP juxtaposing the lofty ideas expressed within, and you can’t help but feel a little dressed up with nowhere to go as the thirty-six minutes play out.

So, Lips fans can rest assured: Wayne Coyne and co. know how to pick themselves up, and this Autumn their tentatively cheery recuperation remains Hollywood’s biggest loss. Given the chance to run at full length, this could’ve been yet another defining album for the group that so often beguile and impress evenly, but as it stands it’s certainly worth the time studio execs won’t afford it.