Fortunately, the album's expert sequencing makes the shifts between the two poles feel natural, and puts tracks that wouldn't necessarily stand on their own to effective transitional use. Taken back-to-back, "2012" and "Ashes in the Air" provide a handy microcosm of the emotional extremes between which the Flaming Lips vacillate on Heady Fwends. But then the song blossoms into a disarmingly elegiac chorus that makes the scorched-earth scene suddenly feel very real and despairing. The subsequent synth-smeared ballad "Ashes in the Air" further reinforces this logic, with Coyne offering an almost comically grave account of being chased by "robot dogs" through some post-war wasteland, while Justin Vernon echoes each line with his best Rick Moranis-doing-Michael McDonald.
And therein lies the key to approaching Heady Fwends: What at first seems rather silly actually proves to be quite purposeful. But as chaotic and scatterbrained as the track is, it effectively sets the all-bets-are-off tenor of the record, and actually serves to introduce the predominant themes of science fiction and global apocalypse that run through many of the tracks here. Not only do the Lips lead with their most unlikely and unapologetically obnoxious collaborator, Ke$ha, they let her run roughshod on a classic Stooges song: "2012" presents a mutant, robot-rock rewrite of "1969" that cranks up the original's Bo Diddley beat into an industrial-strength stomp and sees Ke$ha appropriating Iggy's "oh my and boo hoo" sneer as her own. Heady Fwends immediately adopts a more sacrilegious tack. If anything, Heady Fwends is arguably an even more wiggy experience than Embryonic, an album that marked the Lips' return to brain-bending, fuzz-covered psychedelia, but was still very much beholden to the record-collector canon of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Can. But here's the craziest thing about the whole project: This piecemeal patchwork of tracks hangs together amazingly well as a front-to-back album- to the point where, if the band had released this as the official follow-up to Embryonic, without the public stunt-casting campaign and Record Store Day tie-in, no Flaming Lips fan would feel short-changed. The songs on Heady Fwends are likewise rife with indicators of their hastily cobbled-together origins: flubbed vocal cues, songs obviously constructed via email file swaps (Ono's "Do It!"), goofy lyrics that sound like they were written seconds before recording ("You always want/ To shave my balls/ That ain't my trip"). And while the first of these pairings to surface- EPs with Neon Indian, Lightning Bolt, Prefuse 73, and Yoko Ono, each represented here with a single track- yielded interesting moments of aesthetic intersection, their free-form nature didn't exactly demand repeat listens.
When the Lips started plotting these collaborations last year, they seemed like the latest in a growing line of guinea-pig projects that have kept the band busy since 2009's Embryonic, click-bait novelties to be filed alongside the six-hour songs and gummy-skull-encased USB sticks. Really, all you need to complete the picture is a Pauly D remix. The internet may have splintered the pop monoculture into myriad musical streams, but Heady Fwends provides as inclusive a congregation of the entire, circa-2012 under-to-overground spectrum as you can muster in a single album, with a guest list that spans top-40 stars (Ke$ha, Chris Martin) and noise-rock extremists (Lightning Bolt), anarchic avant guardians (Nick Cave, Yoko Ono) and chilled-out indie new-schoolers (Bon Iver, Neon Indian), electronic experimentalists (Prefuse 73) and hip-hop heroes-cum-children's-television hosts (Biz Markie).
On paper, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends- a Record Store Day round-up of various collaborations conducted over the past year- doesn't appear to be the next official chapter in the band's ever-evolving history so much as a tribute to Coyne's skills of diplomacy, like his hyperactive Twitter feed brought to life.
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