The Flaming Lips — flaminglips.com

It can be difficult to fathom the fact that the Flaming Lips have been together in some form or another for 35 years. And while the consistent thread throughout the band's discography has been a unique strain of "weirdness", it's also breathtaking to take in their evolution over the course of 14 studio albums and various projects and collaborations. But before the band of oddballs from Norman, Oklahoma became the de facto indie experimental freaks the world knows and loves, there was an early, rawer, more direct sound to their music. That's where Seeing the Unseeable: The Complete Studio Recordings of the Flaming Lips, 1986-1990 comes in. A collection of their first four full-length studio albums in addition to two discs of rarities from that period, Seeing the Unseeable is the Flaming Lips in all their nascent, punk rock, salad-day glory. Before the freak pop hit that landed them on Beverly Hills, 90210, before singer/guitarist Wayne Coyne's rumpled white suit, before the boom-box experimentalism of Zaireeka, before the head-scratching Miley Cyrus collaborations, the Lips were signed to Restless Records and recorded a string of rough, strange, aggressive music at the tail end of the 1980s.

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