Kings Mouth
| Flaming Lips
Kings Mouth
King's Mouth: Music and Songs is the 15th studio album from The Flaming Lips. It was released on Record Store Day on April 13, 2019 as a limited run of 4,000 gold-coloured records for the event. An official commercial version was released on July 19th 2019.
King's Mouth is a concept album that was conceived as the soundtrack to an art exhibit of the same name by frontman Wayne Coyne, which opened in 2017. The album features Mick Jones of The Clash providing narration on several tracks. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
As far as concept albums about magical, abnormally sized severed heads go, this is a pretty breezy listen.
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The Guardian
After a long spell of indulging in 24-hour jams and Stone Roses covers, Wayne Coyne’s band marshal their psychedelic powers for lush, honed songs.
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Rolling Stone
The venerable psych-rock crew’s 15th album feels weighed down by its high-concept ambition.
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NME
This 15th Flaming Lips record – rumoured to be a kind of Wayne Coyne solo project – finds the band more playful, cinematic and cohesive than they've been since ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’.
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Pop Matters
The album suffers from the inclusion of hangovers from its past as a piece of musical accompaniment, but the addition of album filler is minor when the majority of the album is enjoyably engaging.
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COS
After a decade of the band going off in all kinds of directions and risking becoming a parody of themselves, it’s a comfort to have them return back to basics for a moment.
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All Music
Even if it's not quite as fully realized as some of their other albums, King's Mouth boasts enough beautiful music and striking imagery to make it well worth hearing, especially for Flaming Lips fans who miss the music they made in the 2000s.
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Paste Music
King’s Mouth is sunny psychedelia with a bonkers storyline and some of the band’s most convincing pop tunes in years. It’s pleasantly concise—a welcome change from Oczy Mlody and Heady Fwends—and doesn’t rely on excessive guests, 24-hour songs, LPs pressed with menstrual blood, or any other gimmickry to impress you.
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The Quietus
It inspires thoughts about infinite imagination and the endless possible responses people have to music, especially when experienced inside a severed silver head in an art gallery.
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Sputnik Music
A partial return to excellence.
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Brooklyn Vegan
The Flaming Lips’ terrific ‘King’s Mouth’ brings back ‘The Soft Bulletin’ spirit.
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Rolling Stone
The venerable psych-rock crew’s 15th album feels weighed down by its high-concept ambition.
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The Student Playlist
A concept album revolving around a giant baby ruling a city, ‘King’s Mouth’ represents another good access point to the weird and wonderful world of The Flaming Lips.
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The Line of Best Fit
King’s Mouth is the most satisfying Flaming Lips album in some time.
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Riot
King’s Mouth is a canonised approach from the Lips, and is tasteful in its lysergically-laden composition. Importantly, it doesn’t get tiring before you’ve had a chance to really listen to it. The album engages with electronic instrumentation to create what sounds like a glitched-out childlike dream.
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Slant
The Flaming Lips’s King’s Mouth Brings the Hooks but Lacks Heft.
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DIY
The album climaxes with layers of piano and guitar on the elated closing ballad 'How Can A Head' with not a step misplaced on the journey to get there. Long live the king!
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Vinyl Chapters
King’s Mouth signals a welcome return to form, an engaging, meticulously arranged and grandiose set of fantasias that doesn’t sacrifice their natural inclinations towards eccentric whimsy, infinite wonder and instrumental intricacy.
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Hot Press
King’s Mouth is The Flaming Lips’s most cohesive work in ages, benefitting from a concept as absurd as the band themselves.
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Chicago Sun Times
“King’s Mouth: Music and Songs” is a beautifully crafted psychedelic album that may remind you of early Genesis in its musicianship and ambition.
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Narc
After a decade of bleak and increasingly darker psychedelic jams, it’s a genuine elation to hear The Flaming Lips returning to the light with a work that is ambitiously brave, optimistically mind-bending, technicolour drenched and – on the whole – a real return to form.
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The Irish Times
Originally dropped as a Record Store Day exclusive, King’s Mouth probably should have been spared a wider release, leaving it as a curio in the band’s undeniably brilliant body of work.
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ABC News
"King's Mouth: Music and Songs" is a beautifully crafted psychedelic album that may remind you of early Genesis in its musicianship and ambition.
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Go London
A freaked-out fairytale to gently fry your brain.
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7th Level Music
If you’ve ever considered writing a concept album about a mythological kingdom ruled by a giant whose rule was foretold by a sparrow, I’m sorry to inform you the Flaming Lips have already done it and I’m sure have done it better than any of us could’ve done.
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NZ Herald
Like much of The Flaming Lips catalogue, not a lot makes sense but if you let go and roll with it, you're sure to enjoy the ride.
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Ap News
The ever-evolving, mind-blowing alt-rockers have somehow upped their game with a concept album and accompanying art project that takes us into a giant head. Weird? Yes. Thrilling? Of course. This is the Lips, after all.
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Freaky Party
Their most appealing album in years.
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The Times
Oklahoma’s premier psychedelic weirdos go back to their roots on this fairytale concept piece about a king who saves his people from an avalanche.
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Buffablog
As this is a concept album, we came into it expecting to hear the band explore different genres and variations on tempo, and we haven’t been disappointed.
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The Needle Drop
The times when King's Mouth sounds like classic Flaming Lips partly make up for the album's spotty narrative development and pacing.
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MSN Entertainment
"King's Mouth: Music and Songs" is a beautifully crafted psychedelic album that may remind you of early Genesis in its musicianship and ambition.
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The Straits Times
Delightful, mind-bending rock from The Flaming Lips' latest release, King's Mouth.
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The Daily Nebraskan
In “King’s Mouth,” The Flaming Lips are living in their own world of creative freedom, painting pictures with their music just as they always have.
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Cryptic Rock
Some albums are spiritual experiences, and it is not blasphemous to say King’s Mouth: Music and Songs is one of them. The Flaming Lips invite listeners to take some time and immerse themselves in a sonic slam dunking of sound.
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Lemon Wire
“King’s Mouth” is filled with bright melodies, high-energy rhythms, and heartfelt lyrics. It’s true success, in my opinion, comes from crafting a cohesive storytelling experience, that reaches to grasp the big questions of life, death, and love.
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MXDWN
The Flaming Lips have orchestrated an album that summons all the artistic brilliance of their past and reminds us why their act has remained innovative for decades.
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Post Trash
A band like The Flaming Lips is able to create a space composed of an infinite number of horizons, in fact on King's Mouth there is that impetus from Sun Ra, which allows you to "reach every planet in the sky". The album is a new model of storytelling, a shoot the cards on the table, the crasis between your subscription to Audible and Spotify.
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QRO Magazine
Yet their recorded output has never exceeded or even matched their beloved turn-of-the-millennium seminal releases The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. But now they finally give a spiritual, conceptual album successor, King’s Mouth.
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Stereogum
Also, King’s Mouth serves as the environmental soundtrack for frontman Wayne Coyne’s immersive, psychedelic art installation of the same name.
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Mystic Sons
'King's Mouth' has this smooth and succinct feel to it and never seems to want to stray too far from its core sound, making for an incredible easy and enjoyable record. A strong record from a band that always seem to be on the edge of greatness whenever they find their form. 7/10
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Broadway World
"The King's Mouth immersive/child-like qualities are born from the same spark and womb as The Flaming Lips' live performances. The King's Mouth adventure was made for humans of all sizes, ages, cultures, and religions."
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Livexlive
The album finds the band more playful, cinematic and cohesive than they've been since YOSHIMI BATTLES THE PINK ROBOTS.
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Beat Route
In this era of ruthless opportunists in the highest offices, King’s Mouth brings to life a beautiful and expansive tale of mortality and sacrifice, communicating that your last word can have an impact long after your effigy has been erected.
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Eject
With “King’s Mouth,” The Flaming Lips have created one of their most focused albums in years, and in the process, made perhaps the most whimsical prog record of all time.
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Go!
The music parallels frontman Wayne Coyne’s immersive art installation of the same name that takes onlookers into a 10-foot tall chrome head, where they sit on teeth-shaped foam pillows and experience a pulsing light show triggered by the Lips’ music. It sounds like peak Flaming Lips.
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Dope University
The Flaming Lips Return to Form on the Fantastical King’s Mouth.
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The Mainichi
"King's Mouth: Music and Songs" is a beautifully crafted psychedelic album that may remind you of early Genesis in its musicianship and ambition.
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Our Culture
King’s Mouth sees the band embarking on the kind of eccentric, over-the-top, goofy psychedelic ride they became known for.
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Jam Blog
It may not win over completely new listeners, but King’s Mouth is more likely to interest older fans who have not kept up with things in the post-Yoshimi years and especially those who cherish that album and the masterpiece that is The Soft Bulletin the most of all.
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