Embryonic

The first thing I thought after listening to Embryonic in full, or at least one of the first thoughts (I have lots of thoughts sometimes), was “how will these songs, which are clearly different than those with which they’ve made their bread and butter over the past decade, translate live?” The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi made the Flaming Lips festival-headlining quality stars, a rare band that could, if it wanted to, survive completely off touring revenue and play the same 20 songs over and over again forever (and residuals from HP figure in there too, I suppose).

Then they come out with an album like Embryonic, which contains nothing even remotely close to “Fight Test” or “Waiting for a Superman,” or even “She Don’t Use Jelly.” The first single is “Convinced of the Hex,” the refrain of which addresses “the distance between us,” and “I believe in nothing,” and the groove of which suggests Silver Apples, neither of which necessarily lend themselves to confetti guns and large-scale singalongs. Are the Lips making an active attempt to kill off the rest of their late-blooming fans that At War with the Mystics didn’t? Are they at the end of their Warner contract and just cranking out 70 minutes of dark psychedelia to break off from their label and Pull A Radiohead?

These things I am not sure of. I am sure that “Hex,” and a good 40-45 minutes of Embryonic, are the best things that the Flaming Lips have done since Bulletin–and even more impressively, nothing like they’ve done before. It’s like when they were shooting Christmas on Mars, they accidentally found a time/space portal, and were able to transport themselves to an alternate Flaming Lips universe, in which they could experiment with sounds that would make them come across like Can, and then they made this album. You can’t blame some dudes for getting sick of being widely pigeonholed for a sound/style they’ve only been really focusing on for about 1/3 of their career, and wanting to take their outfit in a new/old/new again direction. Whatever happened, good for them though, right? You just want these guys to always be around, in some form.

Oh, and the live part–they’re still figuring it out, but it’s cool to see the Lips look like a crack indie-psych rock band, as they do below. The sort of band they could have easily been (but thankfully they were the band they were, though it’s good they’re this band when they’re old):

Filed under: flaming lips