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BY JOSHUA BAYER
Daily Music Editor
Published October 10, 2009
In the words of Flaming Lips uberman Wayne Coyne: “Somewhere along the way it occurred to me that we should do a double album ... Just this idea that you can weave a couple of themes into there and you can sprawl a little bit.” Embryonic sprawls a lot. It also meanders, spaces out and — occasionally — sucker punches you in the cerebellum.
The Flaming Lips
Embryonic
Warner Bros.
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The record suffers from a classic case of double-album syndrome. From a band that’s been so chronically consistent in its songwriting, Embryonic is a disappointing mix of songs that are songs and songs that are ideas. The record is the “fearless freaks” at their most mind-jarringly experimental, but much of the experimentation here is fruitless, clogging up the album’s flow with whacked-out filler.
Embryonic is stocking-stuffed with “mood” pieces that sound like they should be 45-second interludes but are stretched out exhaustingly to the three-minute mark. “Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast” is like a five-minute sleep hypnosis tape for absurdists, with wildlife noises, space-opera ooh-ing and ahh-ing and some guy who sounds like Dumbledore solemnly intoning “This is the beginning” over and over again. “Scorpio Sword” is an endless build-up of monomaniacal drum rolls and false-start guitars artificially resolved with the last-minute intervention of melodramatic strings and harp trickling.
The majority of the album’s instrumentals are like texturally rich sonic blueprints begging to be charmed into actual songs. Sure, they all sound pretty “trippy,” but these extended atmospheric gags purée the album’s momentum.
Another momentum-killer is the nearly six-minute “Evil,” the album's second track and first omen that this is going to be a record with skippable songs. The track starts out somberly on sleepy synth drones, drifts into an equally sleep-deprived chorus, indulges in some squelchy bass pulsing and then repeats the same exact process all over again. Coyne’s vocals are pretty watery here, both sonically and lyrically: “I wish I could go back / go back in time / But no one ever really can / go back in time / Oh, I would have shown you / those people are evil / and they’ll hurt you if they can.” While this sort of ethics-for-dummies songwriting works when the band is operating in fun mode, Embryonic’s more “serious” vibe makes Coyne’s color-by-numbers sermonizing feel facile.
Although the album’s uncharacteristic shortage of saccharine hooks (there’s not one bona fide “pop song” on the whole record) is compensated for in adrenaline on the album’s harder, groovier songs, too often does the band fall into the trap of vaguely moralizing lullabies. Breathy sing-a-long “If” and vocoder-addled robo-ballad “The Impulse” feel like auxiliary backing melodies compared to the band’s signature symphonic harmonies.
Still, there’s something cohesive and brilliant lurking amid the pink-flamingoed folds of Embryonic’s spotty indulgence. Somewhere in this mess is a fantastic 30-minute krautrock-funk fusion album. Demonically throbbing rhythm-fiestas like “Convinced of the Hex” and “The Sparrow Looks Up at the Machine” sound like Can exorcising the Talking Heads at a cantina in hell. And yes, this is a good thing. Embryonic taps into a spiny, visceral darkness but muffles it in a heap of tie-dyed meandering.
A great double album is rarely cohesive — The White Album is little more than a sprawling anthology of five-star songs. But on Embryonic this sprawl often leaks from the arrangement of the songs to the songs themselves. Still, there’s enough prime psychedelia here for listeners to edit their own significantly slimmer cuts of what should have been.
