Embryonic

The Flaming LipsEmbryonicBoring. No, I suppose I wouldn’t go quite that far. But following the triumph of their 2002 classic, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, The Flaming Lips started to seem uncharacteristically ordinary. Reissues. Covers of “cool” songs by currently “cool” artists. Tours with “cool” friends. You get it. They even released a proper studio album, At War With the Mystics, that was good, surely, but easily the least interesting work of the band’s long career.

So I worried. As a longtime fan (Clouds Taste Metallic hooked me) who had never quite found a reason to induct the Oklahoma City rockers into my personal indie rock hall of fame (this despite a number of monster albums), I was convinced that the band’s next move - not counting the score for their film, Christmas On Mars - would determine their future. Either they’d struggle to continue their adventurous journey and release a perfectly decent sequel to Mystics, Yoshimi or The Soft Bulletin, or they’d go for it all. I kind of figured on the sequel. Nope. They went for. Damn, they really, *really went for it, and thus we have one of the year’s very best records, the long, difficult, weird-as-hell and even somewhat groundbreaking double album known as Embryonic.

Damn. No, really: damn. Albums like Embryonic - which adds countless surprising elements to the band’s formula, including some Bitches Brew vibes - don’t come along too often and almost never fall from the hands of long-established American outfits with a history of credibility. In fact, I can’t think of a single band in the history of American rock music that has successfully put it all out there to the degree that The Lips have so far along in the career. (The great Yankee Hotel Foxtrot comes to mind.) And it’s this move, I’d argue, that cements the place of the longstanding trio of Wayne Coyne, Steven Drozd, Michael Ivins in the history of indie rock. This noisy and experimental psych-pop epic is the best work the band has yet offered … and that’s saying something’!

Opener “Convinced of the Hex” doesn’t usher in the change with training wheels. Blasts. Noise. Nothing too abrasive but also nothing commonplace. Drummer Kliph Scurlock gets robotic over the noises while frontman / brainchild Wayne Coyne enters makes his entrance with eerie vocals written in pop structure and clouded with fuzzy filters. The band sounds both organic and mechanical. By the time we work up to the 2:45 mark of the opener we know that this is a special album; there’s so much going on that, after my first real sit down with the record, I understood all the Kid A talk. No, Embryonic doesn’t sound anything like the Radiohead game changer, but it does share much of that album’s DNA. It goes for it all, reinventing the band’s sound and style while hallmarks linger. It’s a  big, new sound that grabs attention and demands full attention.

If you go track-by-track you’ll surely find holes. Not everything here is as jaw dropping as “Hex,” “See the Leaves,” “Watching the Planets,” “The Ego’s Last Stand” or “Powerless,” but there are at least 12 very solid standalone cuts here. The rest, while all good, work best in the context of the album-as-long-player. Despite Coyne calling *Embryonic “our White Album … we’re all over the place” (a record long noted for both it greatness and it’s lack of cohesion), the record feels very much like a concept album. The pieces, while surely varied, fit together perfectly. They sound like a session - like a rocker’s Bitches Brew, Big Fun or even Dark Magus. An epic, crazy session that without doubt sets the Oklahoma Lips up to be one of the bands to watch in the coming decade. A funny buzz to claim, considering they’re a 26-year-old band. We should know what to expect by now. Zaireeka planted the seed and now Embryonic proves it: we’ll never know what these guys are capable of and we can never overrate them or their vision.  10/10

Written by G. William Locke