ON THE surface, The Flaming Lips and Glasvegas don't have much in common. The Lips are psychedelic dreamers from Oklahoma who write floaty, magical songs about pink robots. Glasvegas are streetwise, strictly monochrome types from Glasgow who write
dour tales of neglectful parents, social workers and getting stabbed. But both love Christmas. What may surprise you is that it's Glasvegas, who you'd be tempted to think of as having the more down-to-Earth attitude to life, that get more misty-eyed over it.
Both of these albums are self-indulgent affairs, which is not necessarily a bad thing – in fact, I'd recommend both as Christmas gifts. Glasvegas's seasonal mini-album, like Alex Turner's side project The Last Shadow Puppets, is the kind of adventure you only get to embark upon this early in your career if your debut has been so ludicrously successful that your label is in no position to argue.
The Flaming Lips had to wait a little longer – it took them seven years to finish Christmas on Mars. Then again, the Lips project was more ambitious. The album is the soundtrack to a science fiction movie filmed by the band themselves in whatever spare time they had, with a cast consisting of their family and friends (including a couple of real actors; watch out for Adam Goldberg, star of Two Days in Paris, as a psychiatrist). A DVD of the film is included in this two-disc package.
Christmas on Mars has been a talking point among Lips fans for years – would they ever finish this bonkers-sounding folly? Now it's finally here it's a revelation, a mostly black-and-white home movie with visual and thematic echoes of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, Stanley Kubrick's 2001, John Carpenter's Dark Star and, in the home-made, glued-together sets (there are a lot of painted yoghurt pots), classic BBC sci-fi like Blake's 7. The acting is stiff and amateurish, and you could fit the band's entire road crew inside some of the plot holes, but somehow – not least because of the beautiful, evocative soundtrack, full of familiar Flaming Lips motifs, but here pared right back and entirely instrumental – the film emerges as a thing of unsettling, understated beauty.
It was inspired, as Lips frontman Wayne Coyne explains in the sleeve notes, by his mother's dim memory of a film she had seen late at night that made her cry, about workers trapped on a forgotten outpost, maybe a submarine or a spaceship, who are magically visited by a superbeing who might have been God, or an alien. Obsessed for years with discovering what this film was, Coyne eventually concluded it never actually existed, that his mother must have dreamed it, and that it was his mission to make the film himself.
Now he has, and chances are it's the strangest Christmas movie you will ever see. Coyne himself plays the silent, inscrutable superbeing, a green alien who visits a Mars outpost where the oxygen and gravity are failing, just in time to dress up in a Santa outfit and oversee the birth of a new baby. The man who puts him in the Santa outfit is Major Syrtis (Coyne's bandmate Steven Drozd, a very bad actor), who is troubled by recurring visions of a spaceman with a vagina where his head should be. Be prepared: this is just one of many vaginas in the movie. In the opening sequence, Coyne's spaceship disappears into a cosmic, galaxy-sized vagina. Shortly afterwards, an astronaut (played by Coyne's wife, J Michelle) emerges from a vagina-shaped spacepod, while various crew members have a habit of burying their hands deep inside vagina-shaped control panels. It's very David Cronenberg.
It also makes perfect sense, since the film is about new life emerging from the shadow of death. In this way, it's remarkably faithful to the Christmas spirit. Coyne's alien is part God, part wise man, helping to shepherd a Christmas baby into a harsh, unforgiving world in which mankind's ambition has outstripped its capabilities, leaving the characters floundering psychologically and yet still, somehow, muddling through. Coyne's slightly comic Santa outfit, which previously belonged to a character who committed suicide, makes this all the more oddly poignant.
The film closes with a rendition of Silent Night, as does Glasvegas's six-track Christmas collection. Being Glasvegas, they change it into a minor key, fitting for an album that, for the most part, is relentlessly bleak. "Christmas is here again," sings James Allan on the brief opening song. "It don't seem so different from last year which was filled with emptiness." From there, we progress to a song called F*** You, It's Over, a more spiteful take on Wham!'s Last Christmas, and then Cruel Moon, about being homeless at Christmas ("You think this is a world away? Beware of darkness for this could be you someday.")
But then, just as things look utterly empty, along comes the Yuletide spirit to sort things out: "The ringing from the bells keeps screaming out love, as snow falls from heaven above." Subtle it is not, especially when listened to right after watching Christmas on Mars. While the Lips conjure their own rich, subtle, idiosyncratic take on Christmas imagery, Glasvegas offer standard Christmas clichés as a cushion for despair and leave it at that. Not that the Lips are immune to sentimentality – they manage to throw in snowfall at the end of the film – but at least they have something original to say about Christmas.
This will be sacrilege to some but there is, ultimately, not that much difference between listening to A Snowflake Fell… and listening to Cliff Richard's latest Christmas hit. Cliff just chooses not to beat you up before he dangles mistletoe in your face.
