So far, Wayne Coyne, Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins have made our grey cells busy with almost everything they desired. From the nihilistic alternative rock days of “She Don’t Use Jelly”, the playfulness and curiosity of Clouds Taste Metallic, the sheer experimental era of Zaireeka and then stepping into a mainstream and artistic phase with 1999’s The Soft Bulletin. I guess they never stopped alluring our subconscious as they almost never stayed the same Lips that we had known. They even went pseudo-electro-pop on the timeless Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and then tried to stretch that electro aura wider to bring anti-Bush reflections into the scene, the not-so-deserving At War With the Mystics was the result, and even At War was not a bad album in the end of the day.

But upon the next big FL thing, the soundtrack to their weird hallucinating film Christmas On Mars released last year might come as a good introduction, although it was all prepared in 2005. And then by the revelation of the cover art and this “she” character that has just opened up her eye to a whole new version of reality through a mind-rotation, one finds out that on Embryonic you might not be dealing with the post-1999 era of the Lips. You are about to hear The Lips of which the likes of you’ve never heard.

OK, I’ll admit that I really don’t understand! I remember this feeling earlier this year when I first listened to Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, not that they sound similar whatsoever, but that these albums may not present the proper sound of the status quo, and they have to be scrutinized further in the upcoming decade. It’s right from the jump start of the opener “Convinced of the Hex” that I got the clue, this is void of any sort of Yoshimi charm or Soft Bulletin eccentric harmonies.

Embryonic is excessively surreal and stereotype-escaping in its deep hot core. And stepping vigorously on this path, the 18 track double disk record is least likely to sound edited and clean, but it’s almost clumsy and lousy in the end and sinister in words. The melodies and noisy-guitar lines are written so they can quickly flee. Wayne Coyne nearly forgets about singing and sticks to creating resonances and acting like a complementary instrument himself. Even when he does want to be heard there’s always this deep layer of psychedelic shell that covers our alertness. Despite being self-destructive and harsh to its real meaning, Embryonic pursues a certain path of sci-fi psychedelica death-bed that brings all the elements together to sound as one restless hallucinating journey, as though we are hearing vague conversations between an embryo and her mother or vice versa.

Among all the 18 works on these two disks, none seem to reach any summit. But investigating the band history and all that precious buoyant hits with likes of “Do You Realize??” (that later became the official rock anthem of Oklahoma), “Race For the Prize” and many others, the undecided essence of the songs on Embryonic is probably what makes the album the way it is. The record is probably too avant-garde even in this decade of post-modern indie glory and it would be the biggest mistake to simply clear it out as “experimental” and let it dust up in our CD collections. So, if you’re about to hear these impossible anecdotes of ambiguity and self-awareness, be patient. The Flaming Lips is not a band to get you instantly. I remember I used to skip the 2nd half of Yoshimi, until I gave them several listens and I used to think The Soft Bulletin is far from compatible with my ears. Hopefully, I was wrong!

I suppose it’s difficult to differentiate between Barrett-concocted psychedelia and the post-punk and Kraut-rock that followed it… Barrett was such an influential force and ahead of his time that it is difficult to coin an entire era, genre, or influence after him simply because there was never anyone quite like him. genres like that derived from the likes of Barrett and Hendrix, so it sort of becomes a who-influenced-who game to the point where we’re tracing back to classical music and Gregorian chants.

either way, a great album regardless of what the specific or most prominent influence is

Good review otherwise.

sorry for the mix-up, I wrote: “legendary cuts like Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots in the ’90s” but more meant their ’90s releases that showed precursors to Yoshimi in their electronic tweaking. bad choice of wording, I apologize.