The New Music

The Flaming Lips Embryonic [Warner Bros.]

Back before they struck gold with jelly – 1993 single “She Don’t Use Jelly” – The Flaming Lips were a motley crew of wacky noisemakers. Check anything before 1992’s Hit To Death In The Future Head and you’ll hear mostly noise experiments where the melody was often lost in the chaos (see Oh My Gawd!!! for the best example of this). So when news about the Lips’ 12th album being a bit trying broke, it really shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Ever since The Soft Bulletin, Wayne Coyne, Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins, the band have often been thought of as musical wizards twisting the boundaries of pop music and bringing the greatest show on earth to their circus-like concerts. This helped make them a true mainstream oddity, one that found them on stage with The Rolling Stones and AC/DC fighting SARS and getting Justin Timberlake to dress up as a dolphin with them on Top Of The Pops.

Embryonic introduces what I feel is the fourth stage in their career. Described by Coyne as sounding like “Miles Davis meets Joy Division,” it’s easily the most difficult recording they’ve released since 1997’s frustrating four-disc stereo experiment, Zaireeka. And while that album had four sides to be played at once, Embryonic is only two separate sides. But if there is a band out there to put out a double album it’s hard to argue against the Lips as the go-to band to do it.

Last album At War With The Mystics somewhat hinted that Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots were easy listening affairs, but it still had some of the band’s airiest moments: “It Overtakes Me,” “The W.A.N.D.” and “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” were all used in ads – beer, Dell computers and salad dressing, respectively.

It’s almost impossible to envision anything on Embryonic hocking anything other than maybe lobotomies or that memory erasing service like in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. But the melodies are there – in abundance. There just isn’t anything as easy as “Fight Song” or “Jelly.”

Having leftfield melodicists like Karen O (vocals on “Watching the Planets” and animal sounds on “I Can Be A Frog”) and MGMT (“Worm Mountain”) don’t help out with this either. What they bring to the table is even more abstract stuff. That said, “Worm Mountain” is one of the more visceral jams on this beast of an album; the distorted rhythm section is both downright filthy and gorgeous to receive at once. This devastating combination, though, is littered all throughout this psychotropic 70-minute voyage.

What’s so beautiful about this album though is how despite all of its peculiarity and experimental absurdity, it’s the most fluid piece they’ve made since the flawlessly sequenced Soft Bulletin. Throughout all of the Bitches Brew-like freak-outs (“Aquarius Sabotage”), vocoders (“Gemini Syringes”), fanatical Krautrock grooves (“Convinced of the Hex”), static-filled lullabyes (“If”), wandering instrumentals (“Scorpio Sword”), the cohesion never spoils.

At this point, 26 years in, The Flaming Lips could easily have gone the route of writing profitable commercial jingles and build a cushy retirement fund. Instead they’ve chosen to make an uncompromising, polarizing artistic statement, and signal possibly another direction to make their already boundless career all the more reverential.

Rating: A

- Cam Lindsay