Loud, wild and funny, the Flaming Lips play in the same pen of cartoon-psychedelia imagery used by others, but these disenfranchised Oklahomans, led by songwriter/guitarist/singer Wayne Coyne, possess wit and ingenuity most of the acid-addled competition lacks.

From its uniquely disgusting front cover to the brilliant alienation anthem "My Own Planet," The Flaming Lips (originally issued on a label whose acronym is LSD) shows considerably more promise than just about anything else in the college-radio underground's drooling- garage-thrash brigade. Hear It Is fulfills some of that promise. While affectionately borrowing riffs here and there, the Lips (now a trio, with Coyne inheriting vocal duties from his brother Mark, who left the band) show real originality, balancing the rockin' grunge of "With You" and "Jesus Shootin' Heroin" with softer acoustic passages. One CD collects the contents of the first two records, adding a version of "Summertime Blues" that's considerably closer to Blue Cheer than Eddie Cochran.

The inventively self-produced Oh My Gawd!!! is a surprisingly mature and confident work, with more consistent material and performances. Odes to paranoia ("Everything's Explodin'"), unselfconsciously anachronistic Pink Floydisms ("One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning") and moments of genuine sensitivity ("Love Yer Brain"), allow Oh My Gawd!!! to transcend the Lips' wacky-cult-band image, marking them as one of the American heartland's brightest — if least likely — new hopes.

Telepathic Surgery is a competent but uninspired time-filler, lacking the manic unpredictability that made its predecessors special. Rather than attempting to reconcile their disparate components into a cohesive style, the Lips stick mainly to a straightforward rockish approach that only serves to make them sound more like everybody else. Curiously, Telepathic Surgery's most exciting numbers (not counting a two-and-a-half minute monologue on UFOs) are the two CD bonus tracks: the frantic "Fryin' Up" and "Hell's Angel's Cracker Factory," a mind-melting 23- minute jam that would do Hawkwind proud.

In a Priest Driven Ambulance is an impressive return to form, with stronger material, committed performances and imaginative production — in short, all the fun and intensity missing from Telepathic Surgery. Coyne has developed into a skillful enough songwriter to draw deep emotional truths out of his cartoonish (and sporadically religion-obsessed) lyrical imagery without sacrificing meaning or humor. Similarly, the retooled band (a quartet again, with a new drummer and an added second guitarist) demonstrates new-found finesse, lifting such ravers as "Unconsciously Screamin'" and "Mountain Side" into the stratosphere, and adding an audible sense of discovery to introspective items like "Stand in Line" and "Five Stop Mother Superior Rain." The album ends with a rendition of the Louis Armstrong classic "What a Wonderful World" that's both reverent and playful. (Incidentally, the packaging resorts to an old Phil Spector ruse, listing all of the tracks' running times as 3:26.)

The limited-edition Unconsciously Screamin' EP (with a dandy holographic sleeve) teams the title track with three otherwise-unreleased outtakes from the Ambulance sessions. Like early pressings of Oh My Gawd!!! and Ambulance, and the Restless reissue of the debut EP, it's on colored vinyl.

Signing to Warner Bros. did not dim the Flaming Lips' lysergic sense of pop mischief. The extra, uncredited track on Hit to Death in the Future Head is an epic 29 minutes of static (and distant rolling thunder) ping-ponging between the speakers — hardly "bonus" music, but true to Lips' form. The band applies a more focused kind of madness to the album's ten actual songs. "Halloween on the Barbary Coast" opens with a rubbery guitar line that sounds like a woozy cousin of the riff in Status Quo's "Pictures of Matchstick Men" and then heads into a Middle Eastern haze, a crude but effective avant-garage evocation of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir." The lonely whine'n'strum of "You Have to Be Joking (Autopsy of the Devil's Brain)" features a dash of harrowing orchestration sampled from the soundtrack of Brazil. Without stinting on the guitar weirdness or wry melodrama (the big drum rolls and cymbal crashes in "Hold Your Head"), the Lips showcase their songwriting smarts to good effect.

As post-punk novelty singles go, "She Don't Use Jelly" from Transmissions From the Satellite Heart is grade-A whimsy, with Coyne's wobbly singing the perfect complement to the band's loose-limbed rumble. It's also typical of the album's drift away from amorphous sonic swirl to a more defined (at least by Lips standards) pop stance. For all of its bursts of distortion and messy feedback, "Be My Head" is tight, addictive bubblegum; in both the lumbering, psychedelic ballad "Oh My Pregnant Head" and the brisk, pulse-driven "When Yer Twenty Two," the manic sound effects provide punctuation rather than propulsion. Turn It On is a three-song EP; Providing Needles for Your Balloons is an eight-song limited-edition mishmash of unreleased studio items, the musical evidence of an in-store appearance and "Slow Nerve Action," from an Oklahoma City radio broadcast.

Clouds Taste Metallic is one long manic-pop thrill, more musically coherent than Hit to Death and enriched with surprisingly tight, bright harmonies that suggest a landlocked stoner version of the Beach Boys. The titles are tabloid-headline mouthfuls, but "Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus With Needles" and "Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World" are great, serrated ear candy. If Transmissions is more fun than unforgettable, the juxtaposition of dense instrumental constructions and simple vocal hooks on Clouds Taste Metallic makes it both ingenious and irresistible. You'd never have guessed it from those wild, early records, but the Flaming Lips have grown into a first-class — if still somewhat bent — pop band.