Flaming Lips Get Embryonic With Their Noisy Roots

by Jason Hicks

The Flaming Lips started out as a band of deranged punks in Oklahoma City in the mid 80s, the core of which was formed by lead singer Wayne Coyne, his brother Mark and bassist Michael Ivins.  After Mark left the band, brother Wayne assumed the reigns of the group and got to work making the band a full time gig, which was a decade long process.  Musically, the band slowly learned to play their instruments and tame some of their more wildly bizarre tendencies, to a degree, before emerging with 1990's excellent In a Priest Driven Ambulance.

From there the Lips went through numerous line up changes, survived one hit wonder status after the single "She Don't Use Jelly" made an impact at alternative radio, staged audio experiments with garages full of cars playing tapes and released the remarkably refined The Soft Bulletin in 1999.  The Soft Bulletin was indeed an apogee for the band, as it was hailed by many as one of the best albums of the decade.  After 2002's well received Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the Lips released At War With the Mystics in 2006, which was seen by many as a letdown considering the heights of orchestral psychedelic pop they had scaled on their last two outings.  However, it was almost inevitable that the Lips would have to come to terms with the nearly constant upward trajectory that they had been on for over twenty years.  By the middle of the 2000s there literally was nowhere for them to go but down, having become the consummate trippy freak out band of the mainstream, with songs licensed to commercials and the band regularly playing massive music festivals like Coachella and Bonnaroo.

Which brings us to the recently released Embryonic and we find the band circling, in some ways, back to the rough and tumble acid rock that marked their earlier career.  Coyne recently remarked that the album began its life as free flowing jam sessions at member Steven Drozd's home studio, and that ebullient genesis is apparent.  This group of songs is the loosest and unstructured batch of tunes in quite some time, perhaps going all the way back to their 1992 major label debut, Hit to Death in the Future Head.  Suffice to say that it's highly unlikely that any of these songs will be popping up on salad dressing or computer commercials as other Lips tracks have in recent years, these are songs that must be heard in their entirety and numerous times in order to be fully grasped.

The album's seventy minute running time, the longest Lips album yet, provides quite a bit of material to digest as Coyne warbles under swaths of reverb while eerie synth sounds float in the mix and collide with pounding drums and distorted guitars.  In fact, this album is an audiophile's nightmare as many of the instruments have been recorded at levels much too high and the drums, basslines or guitar break up on nearly every track.  Do not be alarmed, there is nothing wrong with your speakers, it's just the Lips reveling in good old fashioned noise.  On one hand, I have to respect a mainstream album that completely disregards modern production standards, but I wonder if such a grungy sounding album has ever been recorded with such expensive equipment.  Although the cellphone interference present on "The Sparrow Looks Up at the Machine" makes me question if someone was indeed asleep at the wheel during the mastering process.  But I suppose that's just part of the Lips' prankster persona, we'll never know if they intended for Embryonic to sound as harsh as it does. 

What is clearly a purposeful decision is the complete lack of pop songs throughout the proceedings.  In fact nearly a quarter of the songs here are instrumental and on others like "Worm Mountain" and "The Impulse" the vocals are so heavily buried both in the mix and by effects that they are given no more weight than the other instruments that they jaggedly bump up against.  However, something resembling a hook does finally rear its head on the third to last song, "Sliver Trembling Hands", perhaps as a reward to those who have completed the journey thus far through the musical swamps of Coyne's imagination.  In fact the last three songs of the album compose a suite of songs that represent the strongest material on the album, which is indeed a rariety in an era of albums front loaded with singles and back loaded with filler.

Lyrically, some themes begin to emerge in the swirling sonic soup after a few listens, most conspicuously the nature of evil and how we should properly react to its presence in our lives.  Much of the press surrounding Embryonic has compared it to Miles Davis' exploratory 70s albums, but for me, at least in the abstract, it shares more of an aesthetic with the metaphysical space travels of Sun Ra.  A good chunk of the album deals with interstellar tropes, culminating with the album ending "Watching the Planets", which contains allusions to the galactic alignment of 2012.   While another motif of the album is about the search for a coherence to the underlying patterns and nature of the universe, in the end Embryonic is about acceptance as Coyne says "Oh, oh, oh/ Finding the answer/ Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh/ Finding that there ain't no answer to find." 

When a voice intones during "Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast" repeatedly that "this is the beginning" it neatly sums up the Lips' glass-is-half-full philosophy.  While it could be argued that we are at an end point in many ways as a society and species, as long as there are those who remain on the quest for enlightened consciousness like the Flaming Lips, there is still hope that an unseen new chapter awaits us just beyond the horizon.