Song, by Toad

The first time I heard this album I didn’t pay that much attention, I have to be honest, and it really didn’t help.  I think it’s fair to describe Embryonic as a great big mental sprawling mess.  It really is just all over the place; noisy, jarring, weird and oddly melodic.  You can tell they can write hooks, because they’re all over this album, simmering beneath the surface of the smothering cloud of noodling, offering just enough succour to the listener to keep that thread of engagement intact.

When Wilco used to go off on big experimental tangents – I’m particularly thinking of Spiders (Kidsmoke) and Less Than You Think on A Ghost is Born at this point – they tend to have an underlying structure from which they depart, fanny about for a bit, and then return to just as you think they’ve lost it altogether.  By contrast, on Embryonic the Flaming Lips seem to shoot song after song through with a little glistening silver thread of killer hook which they rarely ever abandon, no matter how weird everything around it becomes.  That hook just sits there glittering away through the mess to reassure you that you are actually listening to a very capable pop band here, not just some mentalists who have never seen a guitar before in their lives.

I am not actually a massive Flaming Lips fan.  I never particularly loved Soft Bulletin particularly, and that was the first time I even became aware of them, Yoshimi I really did like, but then At War With the Mystics didn’t seem to quite know what it was doing.  The way they have been described to me by friends is as a band who were never a pop band, really, but who happened to make two really poppy albums.  On first listen I found this way too full on, and apparently that is the kind of band they always were until so many people imitated Soft Bulletin that it now sounds kind of pedestrian, which apparently it most certainly was not at the time.  That’s the view from a long-standing Lips fan, and it’s an interesting perspective, I think.

From my own point of view, this sounds like a group who wrote two pop records, got bogged down a bit with At War With the Mystics, and have just decided ‘Fuck it, we’re making whatever kind of fucking album we want this time – let’s go for it’.  And that they bloody well have.  A great big double disc of guitar wig-outs, noise, strange, shrieking electronic sounds, drums played by Animal’s wilder cousin – they really have just cut loose and blown out every last cobweb.

The freedom, confrontation and confidence in that approach give this album real unity – it sounds like the right record, executed the right way, one that is entirely comfortable with itself – it just works as a whole.  Oddly, that means that although there are loads of bits where I really don’t enjoy the sounds being made, and all sorts of stuff which completely rubs me up the wrong way, I actually think it’s brilliant.  It may alientate you at times, but that just makes the reconcilliation all the sweeter.

I can give you preview songs, but they really don’t give you much impression of what Embryonic is actually like.  This is one where separating the songs from their neighbours really does rob them of a great deal, but hopefully it’ll give you some idea.

The Flaming Lips – I Can Be a Frog

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The Flaming Lips – Aquarius Sabotage

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