On Record Store Day, Wayne Coyne and his merry accomplices in The Flaming Lips are set to release a double LP titled rather irritatingly, The Flaming Lips & Heady Fwends. It’s a collaborative work, featuring the F’Lips in cahoots with, amongst others, Bon Iver, Erykah Badu, Nick Cave, Chris Martin (yikes), Lightning Bolt and Kes$ha. We’re pretty sure that’ll be the first and only time we see Coldplay sharing record space with Lightning Bolt, which is mostly likely a good thing. In typical Lips fashion it’s being delivered with a dose of Coyneian surreal humour, with the band’s frontman telling MTV Hive recently that he wanted to make a record with "every person’s blood" in it, and that he’d already collected vials from some of the collaborators. Again, we’re pretty sure that’s the first and only time we’ll see Coldplay’s blood sharing fridge space with Lightning Bolt’s. Ho hum.
Anyway, in advance of its release you can listen to ‘Ashes In The Air’ below, which finds the Lips in collaboration with everyone’s favourite cabin-bound folkster Bon Iver, and thankfully tones down the latter’s more maudlin excesses in favour of something rather more expansive and acid-fried.