On paper, with an album sporting guest spots from MGMT and Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, it would not be too foolish to think that The Flaming Lips had continued along the lines of their last two long play releases At War With The Mystics and Yoshimi battles The Pink Robots. These albums tended to feature standout tracks; weirdo anthems such as The Yeah Yeah Yeah song, Do you Realize or Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Part 1; punctuated with tracks of barely there vocals and studio effects. Instead Embryonic, a double album which quite bizarrely arrives on one disc, goes against this. It is amongst the Lips most dense and psychedelic work- there are no real sing-along’s here.
The opening track, Convinced Of The Hex, starts the album off as it means to go on, all stuttering guitar, rhythm and Wayne Coyne’s hypnotically repeated vocal line “Thats the difference between us”. The aforementioned track featuring MGMT, Worm Mountain, is not the synth heavy sing-along one would expect, but instead a fuzz guitar monster, with MGMT relegated to backing vocals and electronic squiggles. Similarly, Karen O’s appearances on I Can Be A Frog and Watching The Planets is all animal noises and manic laughter giving a scary edge to the songs. Add to this, the guest appearance of German mathematician Dr. Thorsten Wörmann on Gemini Syyringes giving a lecture and you begin to get an idea of the style and sound of the album’s 18 tracks.
The one major complaint is that at 72 minutes running length, this is hardly an album that can be fit into a short listening session, requiring both time and effort on behalf of the listener. However this does not detract from the fact that Embryonic is easily The Flaming Lips best album since 1998’s masterpiece The Soft Bulletin.
Score: 4.5/5
(originally written for exepose)
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