20 Years of Weird '86-'06

What can I say - Flaming Lips - flamin' brilliant! A good collection covering the earlier years, picking out some great highlights.

Forget your festival-propping, radio-friendly darlings, this is what made them great. Why they would allow their music to be described as 'weird' is an unusual dip in integrity and a clear marketing ploy by Warner.They (or Warner more likely) are guilty of releasing version after version of the same release in the sensationally miserable glow of fashionable capitalism (5:1 surround, singles and EPs with nearly but not quite the same tracklisting) but this is different (except for the completely unnecessary inclusion of 'Free Radicals' from 'At War..') and I quite like this particular bask of old-glory, especially if it hooks some fool drawn in by the false security that "battling with robots" may have created.If you lost the Lips a bit in the last couple of years of radio-stompfodder this will remind you of why you loved them in the first place, and why it sort of scared you the first time you heard them...If you think of them as the band-with-the-people-in-animal-suits don't even bother with this...you. will. simply. not. understand.