You very nearly have to feel sorry for one-hit wonders. In some rare cases, that single shot of fame eclipses the rest of a damn fine album, and in others, it’s viewed — very wrongly, as it turns out — as a high point in an artist’s, or a band’s, career.
The Flaming Lips fall into the latter category, having hit it small with “She Don’t Use Jelly” in the aftermath of Nirvana.¹ While Transmissions from the Sattelite Heart had its moments, it wasn’t ’til a couple of albums later, with the experimental Zaireeka (a four-disc opus that could be enjoyed in its component parts, or on four CD players simultaneously) that the band would really start to hit its stride. When 1997′s The Soft Bulletin dropped, it was apparent that the Flaming Lips’ sound had come to full bloom, in all its hallucinatory grandeur. Half the fun of the band’s evolution from Zaireeka through The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, At War with the Mystics, and finally their latest effort, Embryonic, has been listening to a handful of musicians setting out to do something different and startling on each successive release and generally succeeding. The other half of the fun, at least ’til Mystics, was often as not in the songs themselves, finely constructed miniatures with lyrics that would’ve done Syd Barrett proud married to music that sounded like Brian Wilson had recorded Pet Sounds while listening to Brian Eno’s Another Green World.
Embryonic is a logical progression from what’s come before. It’s also their most challenging album since Zaireeka. This is not, as it turns out, a bad thing.
The album’s opener, “Convinced of the Hex,” sets the tone for much of what follows. It’s lo-fi, cluttered to the point of claustrophobia, a wreck of glitchy static and synth bleeps. Much of the music sounds like it was played through a Marshall stack after Spinal Tap had figured out how to crank it past 11 to about 13 or thereabouts. Funky basslines turn to walls of dubby sludge, and bursts of pink noise wash over mellotron strings and found voices. Bitches’ Brew-era Miles gets filtered through Pink Floyd, bubbles up through Monster Movie-vintage Can. Guitar that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Fela Kuti’s freer-form romps percolates then disintegrates over a disturbed lounge soundscape. And if much of the foregoing description is disjointed and seemingly random, it’s because much of this album sounds pretty much like that.
And if the music swerves from just barely poppy to downright punishing, it’s got lyrics to match. Granted, the Flaming Lips’ lyrics have never really been the stuff of sunshine and roses. That was, in some ways, easy to overlook on earlier discs, mostly because of the tension set up between Wayne Coyne’s melancholy lyrics, and the band’s typically expansive and sunny arrangements. “Race for the Prize,” The Soft Bulletin’s goosebump-inducing opener, is a prime example, as are any number of tracks from its followup, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. The pendulum shift that started on Yoshimi toward music whose tone more closely matched the lyric content became more pronounced on At War With the Mystics, and has now reached its logical conclusion on Embryonic.
All of this is rather a longish way of saying that Embryonic isn’t exactly the darkest thing the Lips have done (that darkness, shot through with varying degrees of crypticness, has really always been there). It’s just that now, the music’s caught up with the lyrics, so there’s not much by way of sunshine, or even daylight, to temper the lyrics’ darker side. The net effect is unalloyed melancholy, at least when it’s not downright sadness or despair. That’s only a bad thing, though, if you go to the Flaming Lips for easy listening — which, if you’ve been paying attention to them up to now, and hopefully you have, you’re probably not doing anyway. This isn’t Metal Machine Music by a long stretch, but it’s challenging. And ultimately, like the rest of what the Flaming Lips have done for nearly the last decade and a half, it’s well worth the time and effort. ²
¹ This doesn’t count songs like “The W.A.N.D.” and “Do You Realize,” which have been used in commercials (and the latter, incidentally, also as the official rock song of the state of Oklahoma). Songs being used in commercials and TV shows may get a kind of temporary ubiquity, but that doesn’t necessarily make them hits.
² The sole exception here would be “I Could Be a Frog,” where Wayne Coyne sounds like his usual self, but guest vocalist Karen O. manages to remind me of the freak-out fade-out on the B-52′s “Rock Lobster” so many years ago… you know, the part where Fred Schneider’s rattling off names of fish and Kate Pierson’s making these little expressionistic noises that go with them. Fine if you’re the B-52′s ’cause Fred’s allowed to get away with stuff like that and Kate could make the phone book sound righteous, but it’s a bit jarring on a Flaming Lips album. Just saying.