Bandwidth

Illustration by Paul Milne

There are few bands as exploratory as the Flaming Lips in the world today. This is as close to a FACT as I’m prepared to go.

Sure, there are bands out there making more experimental or confrontational music, but the Lips do it differently. This isn’t a band being wilfully difficult – this is the last gang of cosmic adventurers. Boundaries are ignored, and wisdom is swallowed whole in their quest for knowledge and understanding. And as the Lips push further and further into the heart of consciousness itself, truths begin to reveal themselves.

(Sound + Science) x Emotion ( – ability) = UNIVERSAL TRUTH, ie. “Everyone you know, someday, will die.”

So why is it that I have been initially traumatised by the new Flaming Lips album, Embryonic?

Arriving a good three years after the underrated At War With The Mystics (apparently an album you either love, or hate  – I love it), Embryonic is perhaps one of the most hotly anticipated albums I’ve ever…anticipated. After years of blowing my mind with stellar albums that just seem to be more revealing and invigorating, a documentary which literally changed the way I thought about music, and one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life when I appeared on-stage with the band as a dancer, I was ready to be exploded into another dimension by this album – I would ascend from this primitive shell into a higher state of being.

Imagine my surprise to find myself getting agitated…bored…angry….confused…this is not what is supposed to be happening when I listen to the Flaming Lips.

One of the major strengths of At War With the Mystics (2006) was that it allayed the universal themes and sentiments of The Soft Bulletin (1999) and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002) to the sonic textures of their earlier albums, creating one of the most lush sonic palettes heard in many a year. For all it’s faults, At War With the Mystics was a joy to listen to just from the standpoint of a band experimenting with sound. Admittedly, it contained some of their most banal songwriting, but the soundscape of noise more than made up for that.

Embryonic takes that sonic experimentation even further, and then pushes it over the edge. From the very beginning, everything seems to have been recorded at the edge of it’s tolerance, causing an unusual distorted sensation from all the instruments. Drums rumble and syncopate, guitars squelch, bass throbs and electric piano tinkles. And tinkles. And tinkles.

Unlike previous Lips albums, the defining feature of the album is the electric piano, which gives it a weird, seventies Miles Davis feel. Much like when Davis tore up the jazz rulebook, the Lips appear to be doing the same with…the Flaming Lips. This feels so unlike a Flaming Lips album that all the ‘usual’ reference points are gone. This disorientation continues throughout the entire album (18 tracks!), and by the end, a feeling of exhaustion and disappointment lingers in the air.

This was not supposed to happen.

However, the damn thing stuck in my head. People asked me, “What’s it like?” and I’d struggle to tell them anything. “It sounds like…..Can being played by Miles Davis…or something.” And then they’d ask, “Is it any good?” and I’d say, “I don’t know. All I know is that I didn’t enjoy listening to it. That’s not to say it’s bad, as such…”

Etc.

But the more I thought about it, I realised how much this music had moved me. It had got under my skin and affected me. It had provoked emotions in me that very few other pieces of music have managed to do so this year. So I gave it another chance.

AND IT BLEW ME AWAY!

Once it reveals itself to you, Embryonic explodes the world into technicolour. Where it once sounded unfocussed and lethargic, now it sounds visionary and intense. This is the sound of the modern age, a world in confusion, where nothing is quite like it seems, and we are spiralling out of control. Wayne Coyne, once the cosmic balladeer, is now some concerned prophet, trying to force us to open out eyes and see what’s happening. But rather than dealing in trite reportage, he expands upon some kind of great galactic crisis that threatens us all. As he whispers himself, “The ego is crushed.”

What once sounded like sonic defects, now reveal themselves as a band refusing to take the easy way out, saying, “You can do this any way you want to – THERE ARE NO RULES.” All that’s important is that you mean it. And where once the endless use of squibbly noises and tinkling electric piano sounded repetitious, now it sounds cohesive, almost as if it provides us with a rope to cling to whilst everything else falls away.

This could be the dawning of a new era, and once again, The Flaming Lips are leading the way.

Just trust your feelings and leave your preconceptions at the door.