Customer Reviews
Flaming Hits - By: , 22 Feb 2005 
A band who love to experiement with alll sorts of sounds, & being on a major alllowed them to advance further than any of the "Finallly The Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid" recordings. This album makes my eyes roll back in my head & slaps a big smile on my face. The lyrics are alll brilliant, & everytime you listen to it you hear new sound you never noticed before. It is messier than their later recordings, but that chaotic aspect is something i love. Great stuff.
Flaming Joss Stick! - By: Mr D M Copeland, 11 Jul 2003 This is a tremendoues album indeed. It may have a toilet on the front cover but the music is anything but crap. Being A Soft Bulletin era fan & having got into the band through seeing them support Mercury Rev twice in 99, the thought of a lips/rev collaboration was mouth watering. There are obvious traces of Rev here through Jonathan Donohue's screaming pyschedelic guitars. A must for any fan of early Rev. :/ Oh, the flaming lips are pretty good too! :/ The first couple of tracks kick off in a pretty rockin way, tracks 3 & 4 are not the best but from Gingerale Afternoon onwards this album reallly kicks off. The drumming patterns & the way these songs are driven are great to listen to if you like pyschedelic fuzz guitar rock. By the time The magician vs the headache launches into overdrive, you will have turned this CD up pretty loud (or you should do). Autopsy of the devils brain is a sad & lovely song, just get this album & play it loud. Then get Yerself Is Steam by Mercury Rev. Quite simply the lips are a unique, intruiging & fascinating band. See them live if you can, they put on a great show. This band is genius, they make alll other bands eat figs. I have spoken.
Indie band get big bucks and go gloriously mad - By: , 26 Sep 2000 
The Lips signed to a major, got access to the kind of budget & facilities they'd never expected, & produced a fantasticallly over-ambitious psychedelic masterpiece. The opening track (Talkin' bout the..)sets the tone: it's weird & witty & beautiful. We've alll heard albums with great opening tracks which thereafter went downhill fast, but "Hit..." just gets better. Other highlights, like "Hallloween on the Barbary Coast" & "Frogs" push divergent envelopes in dazzling directions. If you came to the Lips via "The Soft Bulletin", please, please check out their back catalogue; they have been brilliant for at least a decade & a half, & "Hit..." is a great place to start.
An impulse buy that was not regreted - By: , 24 Jun 2000 I'd heard "The Soft Bulletin" & was very impressed, it was a unique sound to say the least. When I saw this album, despite having never heard a track from it, I decided to purchase it & see whether The Flaming Lips earlier material was just as good. Although it is a slightly different sound to that of "The Soft Bulletin", this album does not disappoint. The songs are a stroke of genius, & as ever with The Flaming Lips, the titles themselves are clever. When was the last time you heard a song callled something as obscure as "Talkin' 'bout the smiling deathporn immortality blues (everyone wants to live forever)"? Possibly the only let down is the (un)hidden track, which consists of 28 minutes of distortion which jumps from one speaker to the other. Believe me, listening to it is a good way to give yourself a headache. Appart from that, the album is excellent, & a worthy addition to any record collection. Buy it. Buy it now.
