The Flaming Lips - 'The Flaming Lips And Heady Fwends'

PROS

—Wayne Coyne has apparently extracted a vial of Ke$ha's blood and blended it with raw vinyl to sell as a limited edition pressing to a niche range of "interested and rich Flaming Lips people."  These people would probably make interesting Bond villains.
—Though, this may come back to bite Wayne when Ke$ha is down to her last couple thou' in 2015 and fishing around for royalties on her bodily fluids.
—It is the best album you will hear all year containing a song called "Is David Bowie Dying?"
—And definitely in the top three albums containing a song called "Helping The Retarded To Find God."
—Did we mention "I'm Working At NASA On Acid?"
—The Erykah Badu cover of Roberta Flack is about 600 years long. It sounds like what would happen if you forced Roberta Flack into a black hole; as she approached the speed of light, time would move infinitesimally close to a standstill, and so you'd have a Roberta Flack of infinite mass and infinite density singing infinitely with perfectly heavy notes (and probably with a bit of echo).
—Features Yoko Ono, who is a valid solo artist in her own right.
—Happily, doesn't feature the Chris Martin song—that was only included in the Record Store Day short-run version.

CONS

—Matting Kesha's blood into these vinyl pressings means that a particularly evil Flaming Lips collector could one day "do a Jurassic Park" and create an island made up entirely of Ke$ha clones.
—The Flaming Lips will soon be trying to "break the world record" for something very boring, which, so far as anyone can work out, involves live-streaming eight concerts on one day. God, Wayne, haven't we suffered through enough of your cheery stunts? Honestly. We've seen Comic Relief newsreader dance routines with more sense of artistic dignity than the Flaming Lips during an intense bout of promo activity.
—Some of these tracks are less good than other ones. Though, that happens with most albums if you think about it, doesn't it?
—Features Bon Iver.

VERDICT

The Flaming Lips at their most fertile, properly head-wobbling in its commitment to psychedelia, Fwends is an advent calendar with a different psychotropic behind every window. It extends the good work done by Embryonic in moving them away from being cuddly Saturday morning pop TV stalwarts of the "Do You Realize?" mold, back towards being a band whom you don't have to be two-shots-of-laughing-gas-and-a-sunny-festival-field-deep in to enjoy. This is heavy, fwends.