Review Summary: Embryonic, more than any other Flaming Lips’ album, perfectly conveys the band’s mantra and oozes with their immortal form of musical madness.
“That’s the difference between us…”
Embryonic, more than any other Flaming Lips’ album, perfectly conveys the band’s mantra and oozes with their immortal form of musical madness. Perhaps musical genius is a better phrase, as the Flaming Lips, at this juncture, have proven with their psychedelic and utterly insane double album that they are every bit deserving of the “new Pink Floyd” moniker (even if it took them a long while to get there).
Of course, if you listen to Embryonic, you would not be able to tell from the music itself right away, for while the sounds present on the album are of the upmost beauty, they are not what you would think of when imagining Pink Floyd at their creative peaks. And that is precisely the Flaming Lip’s achievement through Embryonic, which resembles the Floyd: Embryonic sounds nothing like The Soft Bulletin or Yoshimi save a few rare moments, yet is undeniably their equal.
It is no mean feat to release a classic album that sounds different from nearly any other released before it, and the Flaming Lips have now done so three times. This is a true testament to Wayne Coyne and the Lips, a consistency that is nearly impossible to achieve.
“We live on the impulses”
On Embryonic, the Flaming Lips continue their spree of organic project creation, and the result is a very free-thinking and unique album. At first listen, this can be unnerving, as the album is a mass of noise on some tracks and favors hectic and dirty bass lines to melodies. My urge to purchase it was a result of listening to the track that most likely expounds these features the most, “Convinced of the Hex.”
“Convinced” also shows the other fundamental aspect of Embryonic, which is finding the beautiful in the dark and twisted. While the Lips have often done this thematically in past albums, this is the first real case where it is achieved sonically as well, at least to this degree. “Convinced” opens with a guitar being more or less tortured, and within ten seconds said guitar produces one of the most ugly and abrasive noises you will ever hear; yet, after repeated listens, it has become one of my favorite moments on the album, and I regard it as a brilliant opening.
Shortly after, the first of many menacing and snarling bass lines emerges from the sonic destruction and is followed by
the lyrics:
She submits as she dominates
She gets out of her head
As she talks to the ceiling
You can hear what she said
Similar to “Convinced” prefacing Embryonic’s abstract sound, it also reveals its pension for riddling lyrics, the very first line of the album a paradox, and a fantastic one at that. The marriage of the two is important to every album, and yet here often the lyrics are swallowed within the sprawling chaos of the music. On occasion they are lost even in the quieter songs, as is the case with the vocal distortion in “The Impulse.” And yet, the way they are hummed and spoken hold inherent meaning, Wayne’s voice even growing weary on occasion, weighed down with indecision as to the meaning of it all, in drastic contrast to its usual optimism. In Embryonic, he has stopped declaring that things will be okay, and instead asks, almost uncertainly, if they are going to be, or if they ever were.
“No one is ever really powerless”
Embryonic as a whole favors heavy volume, with the guitars growling if not shrieking in their appearances, the drums heavy and driving in theirs, and often the overt mashing of sound being so clustered one can’t really tell exactly WHAT’S being played. And yet, despite the album being crafted with the objective of capturing song ideas early on in development and keeping things deliberately organic rather than refined, the album flows very well.
The transitions are natural, and oftentimes beautiful: the inherent sadness of “The Impulse,” describing a girl unable to come to terms with herself or the world around her, explodes into “Silver Trembling Hands,” an utter triumph where said girl leaves her fear behind. And while “Your Bats” does vie for “weakest track on the album” honors, it flows so beautifully into the lumbering and droning “Powerless” that its indecision and scatter-brained structure is nearly commendable. There are quite a few tracks such as “Your Bats” and “Gemini Syringes,” a slow song with indecipherable whisperings clouding its simple beat, that are barely able to be considered songs, with extremely unique structures. Rather than weaken the album, in nearly all cases these tracks strengthen it, adding to its focus on unease and experimentation.
Even with the focus on noise, there are plenty of quiet moments, from the soft lament of “Evil,” to the vocoder lullaby “The Impulse”, to “Virgo Self Esteem Broadcast,” which embodies minimalism and features various animal noises (not the only time animal noises are a focus on the album, mind you). After smashing you in the ears with the bombast of “Aquarius Sabotage,” the track ends with a light composition of strings providing a much needed breath of fresh air. Similarly, after the grinding angst of “See the Leaves,” “ If” quietly rebukes the idea that evil is unstoppable with one of the few dedicated melodies on the album, and seemingly simple lyrics.
People are evil, it's true
But on the other side they can be gentle too
If they decide
At its core, Embryonic asks what it means to decide to be evil, and in some cases seems to express the fear that evil is inherent, and in the psychedelic throbbing where these questions are posed the listener can’t help but feel minute, as if a spectator witnessing a grand event which remains unexplained through its occurrence.
“She forgets about the fear when she’s high”
While some of the Lips’ albums have veered toward psychedelic rock in the past, Embryonic wears this marker on its sleeve, and you can almost imagine the band soaking their instruments in acid before every session. The more psychedelic moments are achieved in the longer songs, many of which turn into jam sessions gone horribly right; from the outburst of guitar on “The Ego’s Last Stand” (which per standard Lips’ oddity was apparently written about a dying cat) to the raw insanity of “Worm Mountain,” and ending in the pounding drums and frenzied chanting of “Watching the Planets,” this album is the pinnacle of psychedelia so far in the new millennium.
This leads the album to following two tones, often displaying both of them at the same time. While the optimism in the face of destruction, or at least the appreciation of life’s beauty before it, is still present often enough, one cannot help but feel the albums radiates a certain venom alongside it, one that warns of the evils the world holds. This is true to most of the album, and is what makes is so interesting to listen to, as from within the deranged instrumentals and constant whisperings, one slowly begins to piece together that there is more than meets the eye occurring. This argument is thrown through a loop with “The Sparrow Looks Up at the Machine,” which questions the very reality we are able to perceive and through this back and forth between hope and despair. Through Embryonic’s assertion that the true elements of nature are constant, eventually it becomes clear that there is some sort of hidden tale being told, though the chances that even the Lips know what it is are minimal.
On the first ten listenings, it is easy to view Embryonic as a collection of demos and jams out sessions, but upon repeated plays it begins to form a coherent idea from its primal goop of hazy garage made sound. The musings are not held to simply the sung lyrics, but those that are simply spoken, ranging from the commands of what appears to be a cult leader to the ramblings of a mathematician playing philosopher. While in the beginning they only serve to complex the listener, their texture and flavor is unmistakably important to the entirety of Embryonic. The same can be said for the song titles, many of which deal with the Zodiac, and add to the feel of mysticism. There’s something terribly wrong and right going on in every track, and each subsequent listen simultaneously increases your understanding while making the itch to know the truth maddeningly grating.
“Yes yes yes, killing the Ego!”
Much like with Dark Side, the true meaning of everything within Embryonic is somewhat clear, or at least the questions are stated clearly enough, while the specifics are left for the listener to fill out. In my opinion, I see Embryonic’s journey from “Convinced” to “Watching the Planet” as a replication of the Lips’ journey to the album itself. At the beginning, the narrator is convinced of the hex, or in other words, believes to know the truth of the world around him. Yet, his companions questioning of him leads to his own, and through the album preconceived notions of power and knowledge are routinely ripped apart, until he is watching the planets, returning to nature and realizing he truly knows nothing and should never leave introspection behind him. A fitting tale to accompany how the album was made, as the Lips returned to a louder sound, became more experimental, and in general, incorporated more ideas from their past, and ideas found while looking at themselves: in other words, they returned to embryo.
Regardless of the theorizing, Embryonic is not perfect, and it is not for every listener. As stated, it is filled with somewhat cringe-worthy sounds and a lack of melody, and it sounds decidedly different from popular music. I would recommend anyone interested to at least give it a few listens, as this is an album that truly reveals itself to you overtime: just as Yoshimi seemed too simple and eventually revealed itself to have astounding depth, so does Embryonic begin as a messy and sporadic album before morphing into beauty. This is less of a criticism and more of a warning label to potential listeners. The true criticism to be leveled is that some of the music truly is half-cooked, as it were, and as such can he hard to listen to. As mentioned, “Your Bats” and a few others (“Scorpio Sword” with its haphazard guitar comes to mind) are more like snippets of what could have been. Still, in some ways, they work perfectly with the concept of the album; they are flawed, but necessarily and wonderfully so.
As a whole, Embryonic is a masterpiece, a true statement to what sonic exploration and stepping away from commercial pop can lead to. There have been few albums that have flowed so well or revealed so much in recent years as this one. And while it is the sum of its parts, that’s not to say the individual moments do not stand out as well. Songs like “I Can Be a Frog” attest to that, where a twisted nursery rhyme leads to shaky grins and unsure feelings. The Flaming Lips should be proud that so late into their career they have created such a broad and unique album. I can safely say that while I grew to love Yoshimi and The Soft Bulletin before Embryonic, despite owning it first, it is now my favorite of their works, and the one that has cemented them as a band unlike any other before them.
5 out of 5.
While I hesitate to list specific songs to listen to, as the album is better digested as a whole, these are good places to start if you’re on the fence:
1. Convinced of the Hex
2. Evil
3. Worm Mountain
4. The Impulse
5. Watching the Planets
