Embryonic

The Flaming Lips – Embryonic, 2009, Warner Brothers

Long-time weird­ness pro­po­nents, the Flaming Lips, have deliv­ered their best effort in ten years.  They have paired this accom­plish­ment with the feat of pro­duc­ing their most left-field, non­com­mer­cial album in longer than that.  Embryonic, how­ever, owes more to the Oklahoma band’s dis­tant past than its recent trajectory.

After form­ing in the 1980s, the Lips hit pay­dirt in the early and mid-1990s, much on the strength of their quirky hit, “She Don’t Use Jelly.”  This college-radio sta­ple, how­ever, was backed up by albums that inhab­ited fully-realized uni­verses of skewed pop.  Both Transmissions From The Satellite Heart, and its follow-up,Clouds Taste Metallic were bom­bas­tic, hook-laden affairs that were con­structed as much from gui­tar feed­back and noise as they were from chords and melody.  The credit for much of this sound goes to their lead gui­tarist at the time, Ronald Jones.

After Jones’ depar­ture from the band, a sig­nif­i­cant vac­uum was cre­ated.  After releas­ing the exper­i­men­tal Zaireeka (which required four sep­a­rate stereo sys­tems to be heard), the way for­ward for the band was crys­tal­lized with the release of The Soft Bulletin in 1999, a gar­gan­tuan album on which the gui­tar squall, which had once aspired to be lush and sym­phonic, was largely replaced by syn­the­sized string sec­tions, chim­ing gui­tars and twin­kling pianos.  The result­ing sound was bold, psy­che­delic and seem­ingly infi­nite.  The Lips had aptly demon­strated what a sec­ond act in American life looked like.

However, the prob­lem lay in the fact that the band had already maxed out this sound.  The fol­low­ing album, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, sold well and was well-received, but yet was essen­tially a repack­ag­ing of Bulletin’s sound, albeit in a very attrac­tive form.  The next record, At War With the Mystics, found the cre­ative well run­ning dry.  The band was resort­ing to sim­pler pop con­ven­tions, and apply­ing lush pro­duc­tion that was becom­ing ever more pre­dictable.  To make mat­ters worse, the off-beat nature of Wayne Coyne’s lyrics focused instead on end­less re-hashings of the theme “Life is short, and death is inevitable, so enjoy life.”  This mes­sage grew more cloy­ing each time it was trot­ted out.

Considering that the Flaming Lips could have set their course on auto-pilot, Embryonic is truly icon­o­clas­tic and remark­able.  The lush pro­duc­tion of pre­vi­ous albums exists here as well, but only to serve as a coun­ter­point to the may­hem between which it is usu­ally bookended.

The over­all sound of the album con­sists of over­sat­u­rated drums, fuzzed-out bass, squig­gly gui­tar and elec­tric piano, the lat­ter of which is oddly rem­i­nis­cent of late-60s Miles Davis.  Wayne Coyne’s vocals are at times very promi­nent in the mix, but just as often take a back seat to the instru­ments.  Perhaps most remark­able about the sound of Embryonic is its con­sis­tency.  Even though it stands to rea­son that it is the prod­uct of many edits, the album retains a live-in-the-studio feel, as if some­one just left a tape recorder to catch what­ever happened.

Overall, the album takes the form, of some sort of inter­stel­lar broad­cast, and the gigan­tic vir­tual sound­stage on which the music sits only rein­forces the idea of this music trav­el­ing a great dis­tance to reach its lis­ten­ers.  This astral imagery is only bol­stered by the high num­ber of songs that ref­er­ence the Zodiac in their titles, and by the dis­em­bod­ied voice of math­e­mati­cian Thorsten Wormann, who muses aloud on sev­eral tracks.

The con­tent of this space broad­cast seems to cen­ter around the choices we make between good and evil.  In a wel­come depar­ture from pre­vi­ous albums, the lyrics are vague, invit­ing any num­ber of inter­pre­ta­tions.  The Zodiac ref­er­ences could point to themes of pre­des­ti­na­tion, or per­haps not.  Machines are ref­er­enced, as are many types of ani­mals.  There is talk of crush­ing one’s own ego, and the plan­e­tary align­ment that might result.  All of it may, in fact, add up to noth­ing, but the sheer joyride of weird­ness is the true pay­off here.

Embryonic’s seventy-plus minute pro­gram is best taken as a whole, but sev­eral songs stand out.  “See the Leaves” starts with a pound­ing relent­less­ness, and ends with an unset­tling minor-key under­state­ment.  “I Could be a Frog” fea­tures Karen O mim­ic­k­ing the sounds of an array of ani­mals over the phone, while Wayne sings about some sort of super-girlfriend.  “Worm Mountain” dis­torts almost every instru­ment in its path, achiev­ing a destruc­tive groove with the aid of mem­bers of MGMT before decay­ing into a lush sound­scape.  The album ends with “Watching the Planets,” in which a ris­ing mantra brings many of the album’s themes together, all while the over­driven sound reaches a fever pitch and Karen O starts scream­ing.  Its is as astound­ing and intense as it sounds.

The Flaming Lips could have stayed in a per­pet­ual low orbit, rid­ing on momen­tum and occa­sional adjust­ments.  Instead, they have pointed their space­ship at a dis­tant neb­ula, and will hope­fully beam us another album as vast and strangely beau­ti­ful as a Hubble pho­to­graph, just as they have done with Embryonic.  One thing is cer­tain: mis­sion con­trol has not called for their reen­try into the Earth’s atmos­phere just yet.