It’s entirely possible that a significant swathe of listeners, who came of age and discovered The Flaming Lips in the last ten years, have gone completely unaware of how shambolic and edgy that band once was. If all you think of in connection with Wayne Coyne and his boys is sugary glacial bliss and secular humanist hymns set against stories about weird aliens and superheroes, here comes Embryonic to remind us just who we’re dealing with.
It’s been a magnificent ten years to be a Flaming Lips fan. The Soft Bulletin was smooth and focused, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was a pop fantastic slant on grandiose space rock and At War With The Mystics was a slightly unfocused placeholder that nonetheless delivered. Meanwhile, given animal costumes, space ships and immense rubber balls that could roll over audiences with a man inside, The Lips have toured relentlessly and solidified their place as one of the most significant acts of the decade. And now Embryonic, The Lips’ new album, is larger, louder and stranger than anything they’ve yet done.
As they’ve been in the studio over the last year or so reports have surfaced that some monster was forming, rumors of a screeching bombastic horror. Those reports were only half right. While noisy and horrific, after a fashion, describing in detail a deep-set paranoia about persons and things (i.e. the voice over in “Gemini Syringes”) Embryonic is by no means a forbidding beast. Even at its most shrill (the opening of “Aquarius Sabotage”, for instance) the volume knob never seems high enough. There is layer after layer of sound, walls and squalls and harps and mad drumming.
The result is a mad combination between Tool’s Aenima, Syd Barrett era Floyd and seventies Miles Davis. In fact, come to think of it, this album is about what I think Pink Floyd might have sounded like circa 1975 if Barrett had never gone round then bend.
Album Highlights include the squibbly noises that open the driving tango opener, “Convinced of the Hex,” the gear-grinding bluesy madness of “Your Bats” and the thumping chime driven ego-trip closer “Watching The Planets.” If some of the tracks doodle around a mite too long without resolving it is at least forgivable in light of these Oklahoma boys’ best foot forward into thickly layered speaker candy like this tasty, pasty hatchling, Embryonic.
Final Word: A clinking clattering collisionous classic. The Flaming Lips serve it up big, warts and all and it’s the album we’ve been waiting for.
Rating: 3 1/2 stars out 4
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