The Terror
| Flaming Lips
The Terror
The Terror is the thirteenth studio album by experimental rock band the Flaming Lips, released on April 1, 2013 worldwide and April 16 in the U.S., on Warner Bros in the U.S. and Bella Union in the U.K. It is the last album to feature drummer Kliph Scurlock who was fired from the band a year after this album's release. It is also the first album for band member Derek Brown. Lead vocalist Wayne Coyne described the album's general idea in a press release. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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All Music
For most of their career, they've focused on capturing wide-eyed wonder, unbridled glee, and the occasional poignant moment, but The Terror proves they're just as good at channeling despair.
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Sputnik Music
It’s a dark heart at the bottom of The Terror, and one that takes a while to reveal itself out of the crushing murk and poisonous pressure. But it’s still a heart.
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COS
The energy poured into The Terror, however, reveals a band that doesnt mind sacrificing all theyve earned for a fresh thought.
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The Guardian
The Terror proves mesmeric rather than difficult. Guitar fragments, machines, mantras, spoken samples, echoes and drones are held together with some of the most killer hooks of their career.
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Tiny Mixtapes
The Terror feels like certainty. It offers no hope but in terror: terror as joy beyond all reckoning, a junction of both fear and love, a purity that pours onto us after transgression.
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Golden Plec
With ‘The Terror’, The Flaming Lips have produced an album to be spoken of in the same breath as their turn of the century high points.
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Earmilk
Concluding the album with tenacity and caution, The Flaming Lips offer 55 minutes of ambiguous sound that the listener can either grow to love unconditionally — or enigmatically loathe.
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Chicago Tribune
"The Terror" (Bella Union/Warner Bros.) is downright existential. It sounds like it was made by the last survivor on a dying planet, a final transmission from an underground bunker. Real-life break-ups and struggles with drug abuse inform the music, saturating it in gloom and heartbreak.
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Time Out
The Terror stands alongside The Soft Bulletin as a definitive statement from one of the great bands of the last quarter century.
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Under The Radar
The Terror doesn't do a thing to answer our lingering question: Is this really what we should come now to expect from The Flaming Lips' music, or are they just fucking with us? It's getting hard to tell anymore.
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Outlaw Magazine
This isn’t the Feel Good Record of the Year. It’s probably the Feel Like You Should Lock All the Doors and Hide Record of the Year. It’s definitely a record you should hear. It can make you feel like the last track, overwhelmed, but it will be worth the trip.
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Daily Bruin
While nothing the band does can ever be characterized as less imaginative than another, “The Terror” marks a direction that always seemed to be coming, a concept album of nine anti-pop songs about intangible heartbreak, mystery and a whole lot of terror.
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Noripcord
If nothing else can be said about The Terror, it at least represents the culmination of all of The Flaming Lips’ oddball experiments and elongated, anti-sonorous jams into a single, abrasively beautiful cacophony.
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Independent
It's not to everyone's taste, but The Terror at least boldly attempts to tackle some of the Bigger Issues not usually broached in pop.
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Review Journal
With guitars and mirth largely absent from the mix, “The Terror” is a bloodless, disembodied record with chilly, hissing electronics, vocals that rarely rise above a murmur and a faint, digital pulse.
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Contact Music
The Flaming Lips thirteenth studio offering is a difficult album in every sense of the word: difficult to love, difficult to decipher, and difficult to listen to. Perhaps it's the absence of traditional song writing in favour of space age ambience that makes the experience so unsettling.
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The Arts Desk
American psych-rockers' latest is dark and strange but rewarding.
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Silent Radio
Wayne Coyne says that The Terror is their bleakest album yet, and I would certainly not disagree with that as I found it indulgent and miserable. There will obviously be an audience ready to receive The Terror warmly, but seven, eight, and thirteen minute bleak songs are just not my pot of tea.
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Vancouver Sun
If The Terror is difficult to digest, it works especially well as a conceptual soundscape, a barb-wired rock fresco filled with intricate and terrifying sounds.
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The Skinny
he Terror represents a tighter focusing of the atmospheric psychedelia of 2009's Embryonic (and, to an extent, their multi-collaborative Heady Fwends compilation from last year). Wayne Coyne's voice, effect-laden and in high-register throughout, provides a familiar, soothing backdrop to the crescendo-building, buzzsaw guitar and syncopated beats of Look...The Sun is Rising and Always There In Our Hearts, which bookend the record.
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Sifter
The Terror album is not easy to digest and maybe not even that easy to listen to, but once committed, the listener will become lost and perhaps enthralled by beautiful electric soundscapes accompanied by Coyne’s high, strained-style vocals.
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Space Lab
There's a great techno-bliss drone undercurrent with the Lip's sound on The Terror. The merging or crossing over of the influence of indie rock and electronic music is alive and well on the new Flaming Lips album.
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