King's Mouth: Music and Songs

For all its psychedelic abstraction, King's Mouth is often melodic and warmly accessible. [Aug 2019, p.80]

12 meticulously crafted songs. ... Just as the preceding art installation invited viewers to enter its vast head of LED lights and wonder, this album does the same.

The musical accompaniment to the installation works perfectly as a concept album, where heady instrumentals and psychedelic pop nuggets are intertwined with swelling strings and a nursery rhyme story narrated by The Clash’s Mick Jones.

At their best – Mouth of the King, All For the Life of the City – the songs here are a total joy, reacquainting you with certain strengths the Flaming Lips have tended to obfuscate on recent releases.

Possibly The Flaming Lips' most upliftingly utopian work since Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. [Aug 2019, p.111]

The Flaming Lips remain masters at creating an irresistible sense of sheer awestruck wonder that demands its own emotional reaction from the listener. [Aug 2019, p.24]

King's Mouth seems perfectly happy to tread stylistic water, acting almost like a default Lips album, despite (or perhaps because of) the thematic ambitions at work.

It finds the band more playful, melodic, cinematic and cohesive than they have since ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’.

King’s Mouth has moments of pure joy and feels timeless in many ways, and for that Coyne and co. should be applauded.

Bleeding between the nebulous and formulaic, King's Mouth simultaneously presents the band at their most obscure and lucid; opposing absolutes that are wrought with the band’s ineffable style. This incongruity does not, however, dent the album’s stronger moments, which can be considered the Lips’ finest material in several 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. Now we wait for the Broadway adaptation.

Though the album's theme is fairly inconsequential, more appealing as a one-off project for diehards, their prog-folk experiment breathes new life into a band that had seemingly lost their way.

Although a novelty, its narrative is creative and adeptly integrated to provide a story that supplements, rather than detracts from, the music. 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.

This is a brisk, bright and joyful album from a band who have been anything but those things in recent years. It’s recommendable for those attributes alone, but even more so when you start to get the feeling that this could herald a return to form.

This feels like a halfway point between a true Flaming Lips full-length and one of their many novelty side-ventures. This is undoubtedly a worthwhile pursuit for fans of the band that also marks a welcome return to accessibility; maybe with a bit of a stronger backbone, it could have been more.

By reimagining the weighty concept record as light, escapist entertainment, King’s Mouth is as strong a candidate as any for Baby’s First Prog Album.

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.

King's Mouth is a light album, one that — in its best moments — ties the fantasy of its central conceit to a studied sense of reality

In many ways this feels like one of the most complete Flaming Lips albums in over a decade. Regardless, this album is pure Flaming Lips and that alone makes it worth exploring.

For those who love the aughts’ Lips catalog, but were thrown off by the abstract experimentation of the last few records, King’s Mouth should be a welcome return to form.

Over nine more filmic songs, a quaint magic unfolds. [Aug 2019, p.93]

Unfortunately, the album only contains about an EP’s worth of solid material, with the rest of the running time devoted to a tedious children’s fairytale. ... [But the full] songs sound like the basis of a proper follow-up to Yoshimi even more than the zany At War with the Mystics, did.

It is in that setting [an art gallery], unfortunately, which appears to be the most appropriate for The Flaming Lips’ latest release as neither the story or music are dynamic enough to hold the listener’s attention over an extended period.