The one thing all these years have in common for me is that while it might be possible to remember a few salient details of what I did then, when I try to recall my state of mind, landscape of consciousness and spiritual points of reference, about all I can still grab onto is those occasional scattered details strewn around. And maybe I’ll listen to whatever I was listening to then, to rekindle the remains of whatever had been. And for 1995, I can hardly do better than to listen to the Flaming Lips.

They’d been making records ever since my last fateful “5” year, but our paths had only begun to cross. Living where I did, one didn’t get to hear much new stuff on the radio. That’s true all over again (new crap now rather than old crap), but there was a window of opportunity for awhile there, and while I’d heard of the band for years, and knew I loved “She Don’t Use Jelly,” it took “Turn It On” to kick its way through the glass--it reminded me of a great lost Grand Funk tune (“for more information on Grand Funk, consult your school library”), but with a crystalline production gloss and a guitar riff perfectly capable of changing my oil, emptying the ashtrays, and pocketing all that it collected. I knew I would be acquiring Transmissions From the Satellite Heart and anything else they would be putting out, happily ever after.

Ignore whatever your history books may have told you: psychedelia isn’t getting older, it’s getting better. Clouds Taste Metallic blew away anything else released in 1995. It blew away anything released in 1985. I’ve played it 30 times at least and every time I do, the tunes haunt me well into the next day, and the way things are going they’ll haunt me well into the next decade. True, Wayne sings a bit too much like Neil Young for some people’s comfort zone, but this is the band could ride Crazy Horse all the way to the glue factory. Clouds is their most introspective album, so there are more ballads than before, but the mellow (not mellow! plaintive) tunes maintain their plaintiveness only at the behest of the rhythm section--you learn quickly after hearing a few that like hostages whispering to each other in the dark, they could be ambushed at any second, trampled beneath the synergy of that exquisite bass, that infinitely satisfying chunkachunka guitar, those Bon-Bon-Bon-Bonhamesque drums. And just as quickly they could slip away into some underground passageway, replete with a Minotaur just down the road apiece.

This album will amaze you every time you turn it on...It’s not just the music, although there isn’t a sparrow falling anywhere in a three-mile radius of the studio without inducing a ripple effect within the band. The all-knowing production observes, interprets and intensifies the numerous, numinous details of this music, from the visceral whommmp unto even the slightest of psychick ethers. But beyond that, you never know when the significance of yet another of the tiny lyrical asides will become known to you. Every time that happens, you’ll have something new to think about for the rest of the day. As in “Lightning Strikes the Postman” with its simple, final observation that “it’s hard to read the writing through the flames....” [These guys obviously hang out on the net!] I can’t even begin to tell you what they go through musically to come to that little moment of clarity, but it’s worth internalizing for yourself.

This comes a couple tunes after we’re informed that “Kim’s got a watermelon gun.” Kim who? The president of Korea? “And it’s the consciousness of love. She won’t give it to them.” Nah, didn’t think so. But rather then let us in on just whom it is that Kim will favor in the end, we’re confronted with the 6/8 martial cadences of “They Punctured My Yolk.” It may be a love song or just one buddy missing another, but two astronauts trained for a mission and only one was selected. The other’s watching the ship blast off and bemoaning the injustice of it all. At least that’s the plotline--the subtext is far more universal: “We gave it to them/They had the power/And power is the thing/That made you take off from me.” (All too true. But I digress.)

I was at a party the other day and turned on several people to this album simply on the strength of the songtitles--how anybody could be rack-browsing and resist titles like the aforementioned is beyond mortal understanding. What? You want more? Don’t be greedy. OK, what about “The Abandoned Hospital Ship,” “Placebo Headwound,” “Christmas At The Zoo?” Maybe you’re not ready for a Zoogz Rift album just yet, but how could you possibly pick up a CD with titles like these on it and not at least feel the need to satisfy your curiosity about just what do they sound like? What’s that--you could? (*pouting*) Awww, you’re no fun at all....

...And let’s not forget “Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World”--of whom it is written “He’s on the way/To a real first/In the Universe/Yeah yeah yeah yeah...” Get this sucker, and so can you be too!