The Flaming Lips -- what genre??

Anyone who's seen my sig in the past week or so can tell who I've recently been obsessed with: The Flaming Lips. What an awesome band! If you haven't heard of them, you should definately look into listening to some of their stuff, it's really great.

Anyways, I've been having a hard time trying to classify them. They aren't REALLY prog-rock...just kinda...symphonic pop-rock. Would the Flaming Lips be a strong and applicable addition to the ProgArchives? Consider some of their characteristics:

- A long and illustrous career with many line-up changes and musical style progressions
- Concept albums, two, in fact: The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
- Strong use of keyboards and symphonic textures in their music
- 'Out-there' song structures... very rarely is there a verse-chorus-verse thing happening
- Long songs - not progtastic long, but relatively long (many reach 7 minutes and beyond). Such songs go through many mood changes (It Overtakes Me, The Spark that Bled)
- Interesting lyrical content, based on the inevitablitly of death, life's choices, and battling giant evil robots
- Excellent instrumentation, with strong uses of 12-strings, keyboards, sound effects, electronic and acoustic drums, and auxiliary percussion
- Technical prowess. Production of the most recent Lips' albums is stunning, especially when listened to on headphones. The Lips have perhaps the most instrumental 'ideas' happening at once, with routinely a total of over a dozen different instrument tracks per song.
- Instrumentals. One even won a Grammy - Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon.
- Great Song Titles - Approaching Pavonis Mons by Ballon, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, In the Morning of Magicians, Ego-Tripping At the Gates of Hell, and the granddaddy: My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion (The Inner Life as Blazing Shield of Defiance and Optimism as Celestial Spear of Action)
-They have released perhaps the most prog album out there - Zaireeka. An experiment in which 4 CDs of music were released as one album, and are meant to be played in sync with one another to get the full musical experiance.

Now, i'm not lobbying for these guys to get included like I once did (and am still trying to do) with Coheed and Cambria. The Flaming Lips aren't overally prog by any means, but...they aren't just another rock band, and in my opinion, they are very close to 'Art-Rock' more than anything else. Also, it must be noted that The Flaming Lips' style -- symphonic pop-rock or whatever it is -- was only mastered on their breakout album The Soft Bulletin, circa 1999. They've been around since the mid eighties playing regular ol' rock.

So what are your opinions on this matter?

    I too have recently fallen in love with this band. I was somewhat familiar with them in the early '90s ("She Don't Use Jelly), and considered them amusing, if not nicely quirky. I had been hearing so much about them, that I had to check out the more recent stuff. Wow! I was having a hard time classifying them too. When I heard "The Soft Bulletin," my first thought was prog. "Yoshimi," and "Mystics" may not be as overtly proggy, but still have a lot of similar elements. They probably don't deserve the title, because of their earlier stuff. However, on the last three, they may just have invented a new style of prog.
    

Edited by bhikkhu - May 30 2006 at 21:06

I love the Flaming Lips! Just finished listening to At War With the Mystics. I have all there albums from Soft Bulletin and there are many sonic textures and such that you can find in prog rock, but there mainly psychedelic pop and great at that. One of the few 'popular' bands today that I really love, in fact there my favorite modern band. It seems to me no other band I have heard sounds at all like them.