HeiBräu

When I was a young man, my friends bought me the soundtrack to Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me. It was actually an amazingly popular album — probably due in large part to the Grammy-winning Madonna single on it — selling in excess of two million copies. They, however, purchased it mostly because they had heard the cover-of-a-cover version of “Just The Two Of Us” by Dr. Evil, and probably never realized the full weight of their gift, since they inadvertently introduced me to the Flaming Lips. The soundtrack had The Soft Bulletin‘s “Buggin’” on it, and I pretty instantly fell in love. I have since been able to release my death grip on the expectation that the Lips should continue producing pop music, which is fortuitous, because Embryonic is far beyond anything I’d handled ten years ago. (Some things don’t change, though — I still hate that awful Scary Spice song on the soundtrack, and during times of great adulation, I’ll sometimes shout “Swinging 60s, here I come, baby, yeah!”)

There were generally two schools of belief governing the expectations of The Flaming Lips twelfth (!!!) record. First, that the band, being incredibly inventive, would surely come out with another winner. The second, and decidedly more fatalistic of the two, held that the band’s rutted decline into the middling pop format of At War With The Mystics was sure to continue (after all, they won two Grammys for it). The Lips, they claimed, had spoken their piece. The perfect storm for failure, actually, could very well have been brewing. They were still bouncing back from Mystics, their worst album in the last ten years, and recording an ambitious double-disc album.

As long as their career as their has spanned thus far — and as high a regard as they have for Led Zeppelin – Embryonic is the Lips’ first double-disc effort, unless you count 1997′s Zaireeka, which was basically different parts of the same 45-minute record on four separate CDs; the album was designed as a sort of weird centerpiece (take that, Windows 7 Launch Parties), as it literally required four separate CD players with which you and your friends could mix and match parts, presumably while abusing controlled substances. You’d think that Wayne Coyne, bandleader of The Flaming Lips, as opinionated and arty as he is, would have the kind of churned and frothy psyche such that this would have happened sooner, or perhaps that two discs would have preceded four.

Lyrically, Coyne seems to have shifted from an elderly intellectual dispensing anecdotes of hindsight wisdom like Werther’s (“Fight Test,” “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate”) to a cogent, but ominous, haruspex of various brands of impending doom: “see the grass / it’s dying again / see the sun / it’s trying again.” Even as he foretells the destruction of the earth, he laments it; halfway through “See The Leaves,” the song has a sudden revelatory descent into despair, and the listener’s heart breaks like it did when they first heard, “is it wrong to think it’s love / when it tries the way it does?” (And though there’s nothing here as heart-shatteringly poignant as the bass-y synth opening of “One More Robot / Symphony 3000-21,” the effect of the music nearly always suits the theme.) Although the Lips have touched on time travel before, never has Coyne approached the topic so soberly, without a hint of sci-fi geekery showing through (“Evil”). The solemnity of the song suggests he might be the only aging rocker liable to travel back in time simply to be a better friend to someone.

Trackwise, there is a lot of astonishingly rich material to mine here, but it comes with a sharper listening curve than anything they’ve yet released. Even early punk releases like Oh My Gawd!!!…The Flaming Lips (that garnered the band a reputation for being loud, more than anything) were still fairly immediate, but the panoply of textures here, by contrast, is staggering at first (“Saggitarius Silver Announcement”). “Convinced of the Hex” is a psychedelic bassline boat ride through a sea of hissing synths, and the rattling blast of “Worm Mountain” is equally invigorating. “Silver Trembling Hands,” with its stop-and-go trades between taut bass-driven verses and tranquilized choruses, is one of the more memorable climaxes on Embryonic.

The Flaming Lips’ “Silver Trembling Hands,” from Embryonic.

Watching the band experiment and act their passions out musically is always unusually engaging, but the music on Embryonic wavers from point to point more than any past release. Karen O’s guest vocals on the dark and playful “I Can Be A Frog” stand in sharp relief against the intentionality of “Gemini Syringes,” which plays more like an aural interpretation of an Alex Grey painting. Embryonic retains its long intros, stuttering echoes, band banter, bleeps and crackles, and generally any studio event that a traditional record would cut out, but the effect is charming, not amateurish; the music is incredibly deft; the basslines are sharp (“Aquarius Sabotage,” “Silver Trembling Hands”), the drums ruthlessly focused and muscular (“The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine,” “See The Leaves”). The synth and guitar riffs are as urgent as ever, but are much more sparse and enigmatic throughout. The various parts dance in and out, advancing the songs a piece at a time (“The Ego’s Last Stand”). Some moments, the meandering interludes might sound horribly disjointed (“Powerless”), but overall it comes off feeling very much streamlined, for all the studio viscera being flung this way and that. It’s fitting that the album should be called Embryonic, since it feels very much like a new birth, dripping with amniotic fluid and loudly protesting its new surroundings. It’s a step in a new direction, but this kind of unorthodox innovation is quintessential Lips.

While it is true that Embryonic could be taken with The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots as a sort of Flaming Lips Holy Triumvirate, it would be unfair to place it too high. The album is a mature, dark, and fantastically layered work of thunderous genius. At his heart, however, Wayne Coyne is both a commissioner and a connoisseur of pop, and there is nothing as heart-staggeringly simple and emotive as “Waitin’ For A Superman” or “Do You Realize??” Moreover, Embryonic, as good as it is, and as and feverishly as the favorable words about it pour in, does not — not to say that it could not — surpass either The Soft Bulletin or Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. Again, don’t hear what isn’t being said; rest assured that under the dense, alien landscapes lie cavernous underpinnings that are ripe with hours of rewarding listening. It’s such a success, in fact, that it no doubt gives way to thoughts about further great things from a twenty-six year-old band that is clearly defined by incredible fortitude. To that end: during “Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast,” a voice continually repeats “this is the beginning.” Let’s hope so.

I don’t think everyone really believes Wayne Coyne is actually approaching 50 years old. It’s easy to see why: frankly, he doesn’t act like it, and his creativity and sundry penchants seem to defy any branding his age might engender.  His childish vocal manner, his lithe dancing figure on stage, the proto-sci-fi themes, his impeccable dress habits, his covers and liner art – all of it might look like the strange, whacked-out behavior of some incredibly talented (and incredibly spaced) twenty-something. But really, when you think about it, the prolific output of his perennially fertile imagination could only have come from under that unruly mop-top of graying hair; it is the symbiotic existence of both passion and two-and-a-half decades of experience that makes him such a weird and wonderful entertainer, whether he’s singing into a can or frolicking under a UFO. As a 25-year-old who faced his last “good” birthday four years ago, Wayne Coyne is increasingly the trump card that forcefully refutes age as a variable in the esoteric equation of one’s relevance as an artist. If that isn’t worth being party to, I don’t know what is.

- Johnny B.