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The Flaming Lips' "Embryonic" or, 2009: A Space Oddity
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The thing that's most apparent the first time you listen to Embryonic, the new album by the Flaming Lips is how loud and messy the whole thing is. "Convinced Of Her Hex" which opens the disc, is all guitar cacophony and muddled drums, with singer Wayne Coyne's droning monotone taking a page from the Velvet Underground songbook. Of course, in the same vein as Toshimi Battles the Pink Robots, this is an elliptical, extra-terrestrial affair, with Coyne alternately gazing at his navel and the cosmos. This isn't music so much as it is highly orchestrated noise, mutilating sonic pastiches in a way even Radiohead might find a tad alienating [no pun intended.]
Again, alot of the songs feel like a postscript to the Underground's most challenging, difficult music, contrasting lyrically plaintive musings as "The Sparrow Looks Up at the Machine" with space-jam freakouts like "Aquarius Sabotage" [which takes a quirky detour into soundtrack territory] and proto-industrial/garage hybrids like "See The Leaves" [which recalls The Normal's "Warm Leatherette" in a strange way,] or "If", where guitarist Steven Drozd sings in a fragile alto about man's capacity for both evil and compassion. "Gemini Syringes" is a spacey flight into the stratosphere usually occupied by The Pink Floyd, with spoken word snippets of what sounds like mathematical equations [as it turns out, German mathematician Dr. Thorsten Wormann was enlisted on this track.]
And it's pretty much this way throughout the double-disc Embryonic: is it sprawling or just meandering? Dissonance or arty minimalism? High-concept sci-fi rock opera or self-indulgent noodling? There's no doubting that even in its free-for-all, discordant style, there's a cohesion unified by Coyne's themes of nature and technology, often at odds, but more often seeking some peaceful coexistence or at the very least, mutual understanding. And yet, halfway through, I found myself considering Spiritual Machines, the 2001 release by Our Lady Peace, and noticing conceptual similarities that were this shy of glaring - OLP's album was inspired by scientist Raymond Kurzweil's tome The Age of Spiritual Machines, and included spoken word passages from the author himself.
However, Spiritual Machines comes across as the well-executed, fully-realized homage that it is, whereas Embryonic feels like one very long, uneven experiment, further undermined by pretentious astrology-themed song titles [I mean "Sagittarius Silver Announcement"? "Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast"? Enough already!] and a gelatinous mix of reverb-drenched vocals and feedback-driven guitars that become so grating, not even the occasional gorgeous harmonies or jazz-improv filigrees [which surface on "Silver Trembling Hands" - the closest this album comes to a straightforward track] can compensate. Though repeated listens will highlight those subtle nuances, and I give the Lips an "E" for effort, fact is, if this had been whittled down to a single disc, Embryonic would've been a much more satisfying affair. If anyone should know that less is more, its these guys.
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