 Media Credit: Warner Bros., 2009
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Oklahoma's Flaming Lips are solid musical veterans with twenty years of touring and eleven albums to their credit. It comes as a complete surprise that the group would follow a lukewarm record like 2006's At War With The Mystics with something as strong and unapologetically difficult as Embryonic.
It's hard to create a double album that can keep a listener's attention. Thankfully Embryonic's full 70 minutes seems a necessity, rather than a chore. This is an epic that will reward repeat listens.
David Friedman, a producer who's worked with the Flaming Lips throughout their career, adds his magic touch again on Embryonic. Friedman's production pushes drums into the red until they become a fuzzy aggressive wash of sound while bell-like synthesizers add an element of serenity amid chaos. The band maintains a raw power while sharing a sincere vulnerability with listeners.
"Worm Mountain" collapses mid-song to a violent jam session, while "See The Leaves" has lead singer Wayne Coyne reciting, "See the leaves they're dying again...see the sun, it's trying again," in trance-like fashion.
In Embryonic's final minutes, a sound clip eerily repeats, "This is the beginning" before the Lips launch into their closing number. Throughout the 18 tracks Coyne contemplates inherent good and evil and its interactions with planetary movements, mathematics and the zodiac.
Would this have been better as a single album? Perhaps, but the "fearless freaks" have been too busy crafting pop gems the last ten years, delivering quirky anthems with diminishing returns.
Embryonic is a pulsing, risk taker-a return to the kind of psychedelic jams that made the Lips famous-with maturity only possible this far into their careers.
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