#22: Embryonic

Embryonic

The Flaming Lips

2009

Warner Bros. Records

Peak position on the charts:

N/A - UK Albums Chart

#8 - US Billboard 200

Weird. I ask anyone I've ever had listen to The Flaming Lips' Embryonic and they all respond with that one simple word: weird. I mean, the song "I Can Be a Frog" features Yeah Yeah Yeahs' frontwoman Karen O making animal noises over a phone conversation. Yeah, it's strange. And clocking in at 70 minutes and 17 seconds, this bizarre, zodiac-inspired album is the longest to appear on this list.

Shipping out in two separate 9-track CDs, Embryonic is easily the most experimental of their albums (and that's saying something for the Flaming Lips). Because of that, much of the album is intentionally and totally disorganised and extremely raw. Clashing sounds are paired together and played almost synchronically, but off by enough that you're forced to notice.

I won't lie. It's a thick album. And I mean, a thick album. There are points that it gets difficult to listen to, and an hour of brash and distorted, buzzing and overdriven, harsh and clanging sounds can easily be too much if you aren't prepared for it. But if you're ready and willing, the musical innovation behind nearly every track is remarkable. Truly. There's a sort of organised chaos within the record that shows that these guys aren't just plucking random strings and hitting drumheads whenever they feel inclined.

With a mix of instrumental tracks, poundingly energetic songs, relatively simple ballads, and a few contiguous tracks, Embryonic is definitely a hodgepodge of whatever creeped into frontman Wayne Coyne's brain, and we've seen since 1987 the strange things that he can create (during live shows, he would crowd surf through a full-sized, man-consuming plastic bubble).

Honestly, it seems like the band from Oklahoma City were just fooling around throughout production of this album, ad-libbing and drawing inspiration from the silliest of ideas.

But frankly, if this is what their pick-up, just-for-fun jam sessions sound like, I hope they stop producing formal records. Embryonic is a fantastic album as it is.

They announced in January of 2011 that they were planning to release a new song once a month for the entirety of the year, their latest in a life-long stretch of odd projects. (One of their album releases, Zaireeka, was released as four separate CDs, each with different portions of the album meant to played simultaneously in four separate CD players for full effect.)

Along those lines, the first song of their 2011 song-a-month project, entitled "Two Blobs Fucking", was released as 12 separate pieces on Youtube that should played simultaneously to be heard as they intended.

Then, in March, they announced their next three songs would be released "on a USB drive buried inside a seven-and-a-half pound gummybear skull".

Yeah. These guys are weird.

But they produce pretty darn good music, if you ask me.

I have embedded a link to "Watching the Planets" below, the final song on the album and my personal favourite.

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Recommended Tracks:

Convinced of the Hex (3.57)

Evil (5.38)

Sagittarius Silver Announcement (2.59)

Worm Mountain (5.22)

Watching the Planets (5.17)