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OKC band's new CD 'Embryonic' stays true to psychedelic roots
The new Flaming Lips double-album, "Embryonic." Courtesy
By JENNIFER CHANCELLOR World Scene Writer
Published: 10/13/2009 2:22 AM
Last Modified: 10/13/2009 8:56 AM
The Flaming Lips crushed and snorted the pop narcotic, and the resulting trip became "Embryonic," a distilled and cooked confection formed from more than two decades of touring and boombox symphonies and darkly ridiculous live jams.
"Even though it looks like we spend years recording albums, they're really done in
moments
," said frontman Wayne Coyne in a recent Tulsa World interview. "This time, we were more open-ended."
They didn't construct each track as much as build each one up from loose jam sessions. "It sounds horribly simplistic," Coyne said. "But we have to make things intuitively — analytically and critically. Really, it just comes out in a panic."
Indeed, Coyne and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd, with drummer Kliph Scurlock and bassist Michael Ivins huddled in Drozd's Oklahoma City home studio to record a set of jam-based tunes. They then took them to longtime producer Dave Fridmann and his Tarbox Road Studios in New York.
The "Aquarius Sabotage" instrumental is frantic and wailing, the epicenter of the Flaming Lips freakout with xylophones, feedback, cacophonous cymbal crashes and laser-light refraction giving way to symphonic bliss akin to transient time travel.
"If" applies Coyne's trademark off-kilter warble to inchoate keyboards. He intones, "People are evil, it's true, but on the other side they can be gentle, too, if they decide. But they don't always decide, we live on the impulses. Love is powerful but not as powerful as evil."
All that description for two, 2-minute tracks. For 26 years, the Oklahoma city act has made its own brand of progressive rock, hewn with wild-eyed experimentation and polished with disco sheen. There's a lot to think about on the double album's 18 tunes.
"Dark Mountain" is sword-wielding psychedelia, distorted and grimy, lurching down the rabbit hole. The tune is leaden, weighted by five minutes of colossal drums and bell-like keyboards. "Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast" pulls voices, wolf howls and monkey calls from the ether. The sounds eerily float among jarring sci-fi keyboard notes and angelic harmonies. "Your Bats" is downright hallucinogenic with its 1960s-era heaviness.
It's all trademark Flaming Lips, blending the acrid with the sugared, the obscene with the serene, the sparse with the symphonic. The album is unshackled, eerie and enchanting.
EMBRYONIC
Artist: The Flaming Lips
Available: at retail outlets
and online
Release date: Oct. 13
Rating: 95 (of 100)
Download: “Watching
the Planets,” “Aquarius
Sabotage,” “The Impulse,”
“Gemini Syringes”
Hear the full album on National
Public Radio’s “First
Listen” program: tulsaworld.com/lipsNPR
Jennifer Chancellor 581-8346
jennifer.chancellor@tulsaworld.com
By JENNIFER CHANCELLOR World Scene Writer
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