As they re-entered pop culture’s collective consciousness for the second time in the 2000s, the Flaming Lips did two things: they developed a live show that seemed to be getting larger, stranger and more capable of consuming everything around it, but they also made only two albums.
On both records, Wayne Coyne struggled to push his plainspoken meditations on Big Questions (death, death, death, politics, death) and the band didn’t really develop beyond the grandiose arrangements of The Soft Bulletin, where Coyne pulled off the Big Questions thing effortlessly and yielded an unbelievably affecting, utterly essential record in the process. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was fine, but it achieved nothing that hadn’t been done on its predecessor save for helping the band find a new mass audience, which that live show certainly helped bring about. At War With The Mystics, then, was the band’s first real misfire; Coyne’s reductive, political lyrics and the band’s sudden penchant for infuriating singles combined with longtime producer Dave Fridmann’s complete and total sonic overload made the whole affair overwrought and notably not enjoyable.
On its follow up, Embryonic, the Flaming Lips address their two major issues: wanting to talk about Important Things but having nothing to say about them, as well as bloated production: by sidestepping them completely. For the first time since Clouds Taste Metallic or Zaireeka, they deliver a full-on exploration of texture built on low fidelity recording, skronk, chaos and acid-drenched sonic detours, and it’s a whole lot more fun than anything else they’ve released in the last decade.
Opener “Convinced of the Hex” takes twenty seconds before letting a groove emerge in a wash of recording equipment noise, and when it does, it’s full-on can worship with drummer Steven Drozd banging out a relentless, mechanical beat atop dissonant, minor key synths and two different layers of fuzz in each stereo channel. Coyne is buried in the mix, the thing drops out more than it comes to an end, and “The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine” picks up into another strange, aggressive rhythm with sampled cell-phone interference.
“Evil” is the first track in which Coyne actually feels like a major presence, and here his voice sounds fragile, weakened by the world surrounding it. Halfway through a low-frequency buzz hijacks the mix, and the signature Lips prettiness gets only a few seconds of airtime before “Aquarius Sabotage,” which sounds like late-period, progged-out Boredoms. There are other moments where Coyne’s voice gets to break through, but only in the context of nightmarish lullabies, like “If,” with a gentle melody underpinned by creaks, and on “I Can Be A Frog”: where Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs makes a whole bunch of animal noises on a collaboration that sounds like it was recorded over a broken telephone: Coyne sounds like he’s struggling not to burst out laughing over the course of the entire track.
As a whole, Embryonic is certainly overlong, but that really doesn’t matter, since this is the least song-oriented record this band has released since its pre-Warner Bros. existence, when the band’s live setup included a running motorcycle with a microphone in its tailpipe and its operator struggled occasionally not to drive it into crowds. The band is now big on ego death and darkness, and is unafraid to either alienate its fanbase or to release something that sounds like it was an absolute joy to produce for everyone involved. It’s a record one can easily get lost in, as Drozd’s rhythms and Fridmann’s unbelievably abrasive production are a totally functional hook for most of this record. I haven’t had enough time to truly digest the thing, given its 70+-minute runtime, but it’s a whole lot of fun to take in. And given that, I can finally say that again, America’s premier major-label weirdos are back to deserving that title, even if Kanye West really should probably keep it.
