In A Priest Driven Ambulance
In a Priest Driven Ambulance is the album that explains the loose philosophy behind Wayne Coyne’s Jesus/Whitman/Han Solo/flesh eating/star travelling persona, that he really honed in the group’s early years…
It is also the first Flaming Lips album to begin tackling the bigger subjects that later classics such as Yoshimi and The Soft Bulletin take to their logical conclusions. Yet it poses more whys than answers - which is it’s beauty. Musically, the compositions are so varied and full of quirks and odditys that the album has a way of never sounding boring - jumping from introverted acousitc ego-freakouts to roaring cosmic punk. Needless to say best enjoyed at ear-splitting volumes, the album absorbs your soul and puts it through a blender, whilst leaving the mind drenched in egocentric paranoias. ‘God Walks Among Us Now’ is one of the finest sonic efforts the group has ever produced, genuinely bone shaking and ferociously violent, whilst ‘Unconciously Screaming’ flies from the edge of a cliff. The song is propelled along by its sense of secret discovery, as if Wayne and co. were looking for the meaning of life, but instead of finding the answer; they found a better question. ‘There You Are’ was recorded live in a field by a motorway during the dead of night, and the atmosphere weighs the song with an incredible poignancy that is at once terrifying and deeply moving - whilst ‘What a Wonderful World’ has to be heard to be believed. ‘Five Stop Mother Superior Rain’ is yet another epiphany song, however despite Beck’s stealing it for ‘The Golden Age’, it still remains the most didactic and emotionally fresh song to have come from the Lips’ early cannon. It genuinely feels like your last few minutes on earth, as the song simultaneously injects you with a spirit of bravery and a vain and self-satisfyingly smug attitude, that ‘none of this even mattered anyway’.
The listener is taken with the Flaming Lips on their battle to dechipher the universe, although it may well be in vain. Never has there or will there be an album quite like this - it has a bizarre habit of making me feel hideously underdressed and far too clean. Best enjoyed with a pack of smokes (those were the days), surrounded by candles, shirt off and safety pins around your neck.
In a Priest Driven Ambulance ranks alongside albums such as White Light/White Heat in it’s incredible aura of cool - yet it marries cool with the heart. Later the Flaming Lips let cool drift morealess to second priority, but for now you have it - the only record that is at once deeply caring, whilst remaining fundamentally, utterly carefree.
