Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 12/10/09
Label: Warners

The Flaming Lips have never been predictable: their 26 years have witnessed hundreds of chaotically uplifting live shows, a Spinal Tab number of drummers, the accidental spawning of Mercury Rev, rampant drug addictions, two dazzlingly peculiar films and 12 wildly varied albums (one an experimental quadruple freak-out). But the last decade saw their most startling move of all: flirting with mainstream fame by winning an NME album of the year, scoring three top 20 hits, pocketing three Grammys and appearing on "Top Of The Pops" with Justin Timberlake (admittedly, Timberlake was in a dolphin suit at the time).

Any die-hard fans worried by this trend will be thrilled to hear the sprawling, double length "Embryonic", by far their strangest and least commercial album since 1997, and a full-blooded return to earlier '60s-influenced psychedelic weirdness. That it follows their first official soundtrack album is telling: "Embryonic" sounds structurally closer to a soundtrack to a very, very odd film than the more conventional trilogy that preceded it. Traditional songs are largely abandoned in favour of gnarled atmospheric jams, with riffs recurring as refrains throughout, interspersed with moments of spare, electronic ambience ("Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast"), and outbursts of clattering drama ("Worm Mountain").

It is also, in comparison to the sweet natured "Yoshimi…" and playful "Mystics", seriously heavy sh*t, to borrow a '60s phrase. Not just sonically, although guitars and drums are often monstrously amped up, but in theme. Darkness abounds, and is confronted: one song is called "Evil" (a spooked, unsettling lament, which is as close to a conventional song as "Embryonic" gets), but many more refer to the evil in man and nature in stark, Biblical terms. If this is a psychedelic soundtrack, think in terms of the ugly hippy meltdown of Altamont, Vietnam and the Manson Family, rather than Woodstock, San Francisco and flower power.

The most immediate songs are all deeply menacing, even terrifying: the lurching, bug-eyed opener "Convinced Of The Hex", the shuddering electronica of "See The Leaves" and breathtaking finale, "Watching The Planets", which sees Wayne Coyne carried helplessly before apocalyptic drum rolls, gasping "there's no answer to find". Naturally, there are also moments of light: on "I Can Be A Frog" a gigglier Coyne cajoles a gigglier Karen O into imitating a menagerie of animals, while "The Impulse" is a whirring, chiming little hymn of hope. Other songs fall between dark and light, like the Doorsy, broodingly gorgeous "Powerless".

If that makes it sound confused, that's because it is. "Embryonic" is an album of uncertainties and polarities, hopes and fears, expressed in music accomplished and bold enough to capture it all. It's quite brilliant, the one thing we have come to expect from this band.

    by Jaime Gill