The highlights are almost too many to name: the madcap apocalyptic animal imagery of “Psychiatric Exploration of the Fetus With Needles”, the bouncing bass groove of “This Here Giraffe”, the jangly nihilistic “Evil Will Prevail”. had produced thus far, and it’s outta this world capital-f Fun. What follows are the most melodic, well-arranged, and hilarious songs Coyne & Co. Fitting, then, that first track “The Abandoned Hospital Ship” sounds like a coronation and funeral send-off at the same time. This is the point where the Lips became an essential band, and the albums that follow in this list are all just varying shades of the gold first glimpsed here.Ĭlouds Taste Metallic is the big payoff, the culmination of every Lips album that came before, and the last true alt-rock album they made before making the jump into…well, all the crazy shit they’ve been doing since. Hit to Death is still swarming with noise, but the band peel back the curtain just enough to make the album sound like a total revelation in their discography. Cellos, horns, three-part harmonies, and overlapping melodies work their way into the mix, elevating tracks like “Hit Me Like You Did the First Time” and “The Sun” from noise blowouts to transcendent shoegaue-adjacent spirituals. This refinement album over album made the biggest leap with Hit to Death in the Future Head, where the Lips really leaned into their Beatles worship and matched their inventive instrumentation with honest-to-god songs. The stretch of albums from In a Priest Driven Ambulance to Clouds Taste Metallic is where the Lips hit their stride, burrowing into their unique vein of psychedelia in pursuit of a singular sound. The fact that the band could go from Yoshimi to this in a few short years might be the Lips’ biggest head-scratcher or all.ĩ. In a discography with as many head-scratchers as this one, At War With the Mystics is the one truly cloying album. But there’s no missing the fact that out of this bunch, only half the songs are listenable. Ambulance Driver”, “Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung”) are actually fantastic, unique entries in the Lips canon. So much of this album is actively annoying, it obscures the highlights, the highest of which (“Mr. The band was coming off two stone-cold classics, they’d never been more culturally relevant, and “W.A.N.D.” was a spiky, political rock track in a time that seemed politically tense.* Too bad the album turned out to be terrible.** The first two songs, “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” and “Free Radicals”, sound less like songs than showcases of how many weird blips and burps the Lips could fit into 8 minutes. When At War With the Mystics was announced with lead single “The W.A.N.D.”, expectations couldn’t have been higher.