Video: Deap Lips (The Flaming Lips & Deap Vally), ‘The Pusher’

Kevin Bronson on March 13th, 2020

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Deap Lips (Flaming Lips at Desert Daze 2019 by Josh Beavers; Deap Vally at the Fonda Theatre in 2016 by Samantha Saturday)

There’s weird, and then there’s the strange alchemy of the Flaming Lips/Deap Vally collaboration that yielded the album “Deap Lips.”

To review: Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd of the legendary Oklahoma psych-rock band and Lindsey Troy and Julie Edwards of the garage-rock duo first met in 2016. There was a lot of long-distance file-sharing, plus the one-week trip that the L.A. duo took to Oklahoma City to write and record.

The album is a winkingly potty-mouthed amalgamation of both artists’ strengths: Trippy Lips, meet defiant, edgy Deap Vally. When “Deap Lips” goes off the rails, and it does, you shouldn’t care much. Some rewarding, if fleeting, moments of beauty are just around the bend, effects and all.

Coyne himself directed the video for “The Pusher,” which is a death wish for people who do that sort of thing. “Now if I were president of this land / You know, I’d declare total war on the pusher man,” Troy sings,” and even if government campaigns like that haven’t worked very well in the past, it’s good to feel her bile.

“Deap Lips” came out today. Hallucinate accordingly.

||| Watch: The video for “The Pusher”