02.01.2010

PULSE RATING 7

THE FLAMING LIPS' EMBRYONIC

by Aldus Santos

It’s like Radiohead for people who enjoy the idea of being able to (sort of) sing along: that’s what I think of The Flaming Lips’ newest outing, Embryonic. To most people my age, the Lips were that band who sang about jelly, fronted by that guy who vaguely sounds like an alterna-90s Neil Young singing through a bullhorn. To people maybe five to six years my junior, they’re that group who recorded a mini-opera of sorts about a young Japanese girl who “battles the pink robots.”  That is a curious choice for a robot paint-job, you might have scratched your chin in thought; clearly, pink robots can’t (or won’t) do you any serious harm or cause you any serious physical damage—or so you believed. As the 2000s swung by, the Lips’ penchant for the otherworldly has tremendously increased. In Embryonic, their 2009 release, one may conclude, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that they have completely shunned the garage ethic and totally surrendered themselves to, hmm, extraterrestrials. “That’s the difference between us,” Wayne Coyne slyly suggests in “Convinced of the Hex,” and, well, appropriately so. Embryonic imagines the world in a vacuum, or from inside the womb, if you may. The womb must be a nasty place to inhabit, where melody is probably not an object, where The Beatles would probably sound as pleasing as Tiny Tim, where everything would perhaps be experienced through pulses, thumps, and thuds. Incidentally, the womb is also a gooey place, but that’s beside the point, I think. As “Evil” starts playing, with its guitars that sound like anything but, and as “Aquarius Sabotage” swings by with its drum barrage tensely countered by angelic harps, you ask yourself a sensible question: how are these damn songs made? The Flaming Lips write easily hummable tunes swathed in rabble-rouser production qualities: unintelligible vocals, anything and everything in wet, wet echo, fuzz-tone pedals, abrasive guitars, theremins, irregular rhythmic accents—the works. In “Powerless,” the idea of a “jam” is re-imagined, and re-imagined quite well. Jams don’t need pentatonic minor scales to survive; jams don’t need to echo Jerry Garcia (God bless his soul) and his ilk; jams can be disjointed pieces of a fucked-up jigsaw, as evidenced in “Powerless,” which is comparable to an artist’s messy workstation—where mess is not “mess” but hints of genius. And though you can’t race down a freeway listening to these sleepers on account of you might doze off or possibly spontaneously combust (and I mean that as a compliment), you are at least provoked. Oh, wait, that isn’t a good thing for driving either. But it is for rock. Thank you, Flaming Lips, though your unpredictability can sometimes get really predictable.  

 

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    • APRIL
      • SONG TITLE ARTIST RATING
        THE DAWN'S THE LATER HALF OF DAY
        6.5
  • 2008
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        8.5
        FOO FIGHTERS ECHOES, SILENCE, PATIENCE & GRACE
        8
  • 2007
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