FANZINE

It’s probably unavoidable for a band that’s 26 years old––particularly one that hit stride 16 years into their career––that their best work be jargonized and commoditized into a sound that is easily recognized, that the band becomes a brand as well.  The Flaming Lips have been a brand ever since… well somewhere between the critically lauded The Soft Bulletin and the first time Wayne Coyne crowd surfed inside an enormous plastic bubble.

But the key to their longevity is that The Flaming Lips have managed to ensure that “The Flaming Lips” is only shorthand for themselves.¹  With their self-consciously self confident personas, the compound in Oklahoma, the Christmas On Mars, the stage blood, the suits (be they furry or iconic white), The Flaming Lips feel like local artists who made it big without really changing anything because what they care about was all that they ever really cared about in the first place.  The problem with this is that their continued success (and access to major label budgets and timelines) and as such their ability to continue whatever it is that creatively fascinates them is ultimately dependent on our perception of them.  As such, what separates The Flaming Lips from their brethren² is their ability to succeed at the game without really caring.

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_{1. Sure, there was a time (the mid 90s) when they attempted to stake their claims on a one acre plot of the then nascent mainstream alternative radio world but that attempt to consciously direct and care about their career path feels like a much different band from a very different place and time.   And anyway, when looking through lens their present iteration provides us, it just feels like another phase of their experimentation.}

2. Ok, do The Flaming Lips really have any brethren?   Looking for bands that straddle high minded artistic intentions and enough success to keep their major label contracts…I guess there’s always Radiohead, but they are younger, less tenured, and far more serious in the face they show the public.  They are also more enamored with electronic sounding electronic music (as opposed to the psychedelic sounding electronic music The Flaming Lips make).  Really, aside from being on a major label and the critical acclaim, what do they have in common?  So who do we have as a point of comparison?  As a cautionary tale of these intentions all gone very very wrong, there’s always U2. They have the front man, the spectacle-like live shows, the long time producer (Eno in place of Friedman), they share the relative length of their careers.  Where they share similarities with everything U2 does is amped by a factor of a thousand until it reaches pointlessness, and on every point of comparison where they don’t share a similarity, The Flaming Lips are clearly preferable.

In other words, The Flaming Lips could probably release whatever throwaway album they wanted to at this point and it wouldn’t really matter.  Sure the reviews would suck, but what impact would that have?  They’d still headline the festivals, the album would sell, not as well as the back catalogue, but the name would endure and continue.  What makes The Flaming Lips so endearing is that they seemingly really do enjoy their jobs, and so phoning one in is never a possibility.  Like an actress oblivious to her beauty, The Flaming Lips simply proceed, via Embryonic, with a grace that only comes from not trying. Yeah, they’re the critical faves on a major label, but also the band you, your younger sister who also likes The Dave Matthews Band, and your English major cousin can all agree on without complaint.³

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_{3. For a band whose performances merge theater, performance art, and horror show freakouts into something that transcends the traditional rock show into trippy spectacle, it’s ultimately surprising that The Flaming Lips have yet to garner a live show obsessed following ala Phish, The Grateful Dead or Pearl Jam. Perhaps the Lips don’t have that kind of touring in them, or perhaps somewhere between the film,  Zaireeka, the parking lot experiments, the album titles, the costumes et. al, they have found a way for their concepts to become manifest to such a degree that being a Flaming Lips fan is a life style choice, one that offers unique rewards for public and private consumption.  Case in point is the deluxe limited edition version of Embryonic, which aside from offering a compelling option to downloading it from iTunes or Amazon, also serves as an entry point to, and a continuation of, The Flaming Lips brand.  A cross between something from the set of Barbarella, a coffee table book, and an object d’art, the special edition appears to be some strange sci-fi object, a furry monolith turned on its side.  Once open it reveals the otherworldly cover art in a full panoramic fold out.  Content wise it provides the listener with two options.  First is the regular release of Embryonic split over two discs, the second is a special ADVD mix which on the right system promises 256 times the resolution of a normal CD.  I’m not sure how many audiophiles overlap Flaming Lips fans in the venn diagram of life, however I am certain that a small number of devoted fans will use this release as an excuse to open a line of credit at their local Best Buy.}

One of Embryonic’s strongest tracks comes early.  “The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine” with its fuzzy bass, groovy drones, and enormous drums, is a song that works like a thesis statement––the model for about half the tracks on Embryonic.  Embryonic as a whole feels like two separate albums combined, or at least like an album with two different types of tracks on it:  Heavy, groovy, and crowd pleasing or insular, limited, abstract psychedelia built on stasis-like structures.  The heavy tracks are Embryonic’s strongest songs.   They find The Flaming Lips playing music that sounds like better versions of what other, lesser bands sound like when they try to capture that capital E experimental rock sound redolent in 70’s AOR4 radio that everyone loves in a wistful kind of way even if they aren’t old enough to remember what it sounded like⁵.  “Aquarius Sabotage” is another of the stronger tracks cast from this mold.  Built on a downward inclining structure of reverse climax, its initial half sounds like three different songs being blasted in a Pachinko parlor while still being preeminently chill, suave even.  Its second half quickly slopes into a mix of ambient sounds whose very absence of franticness contains an echo of the first half’s chaos.

Very often short, and built like interludes that segue into other interludes, Embryonic’s best tracks have this brilliant negative capability that posit their opposite. The album is one of moments and spaces, with ambient flourishes that sound like distorted vibraphones and electronic pianos spiraling and escalating into the blanket of insular-ness that tents the album.  The spaces between the syncopated snare drum and high hat exchanges of  “See The leaves” lurch with a purposeful chillness missing on the more abstract tracks before giving way to a chilling sense of emptiness hung from churchlike organs and not much else.

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_{3 For a band whose performances merge theater, performance art, and horror show freakouts into something that transcends the traditional rock show into trippy spectacle, it’s ultimately surprising that The Flaming Lips have yet to garner a live show obsessed following ala Phish, The Grateful Dead or Pearl Jam. Perhaps the Lips don’t have that kind of touring in them, or perhaps somewhere between the film,  Zaireeka, the parking lot experiments, the album titles, the costumes et. al, they have found a way for their concepts to become manifest to such a degree that being a Flaming Lips fan is a life style choice, one that offers unique rewards for public and private consumption.  Case in point is the deluxe limited edition version of Embryonic, which aside from offering a compelling option to downloading it from iTunes or Amazon, also serves as an entry point to, and a continuation of, The Flaming Lips brand.  A cross between something from the set of Barbarella, a coffee table book, and an object d’art, the special edition appears to be some strange sci-fi object, a furry monolith turned on its side.  Once open it reveals the otherworldly cover art in a full panoramic fold out.  Content wise it provides the listener with 2 options.  First is the regular release of Embryonic split over 2 discs, the second is a special ADVD mix which on the right system promises 256 times the resolution of a normal CD.  I’m not sure how many audiophiles overlap Flaming Lips fans in the venn diagram of life, however I am certain that a small number of devoted fans will use this release as an excuse to open a line of credit at their local Best Buy.} 

4 AOR = "Album Oriented Rock"

_{5 A perfect example of the type of album I’m referencing here  is the album Bamnan and Silvercork by the subsequently great band Midlake.  By and large it sounds like The Soft Bulletin era Flaming Lips lite.  It all has very little to do with their truly remarkable sophomore album, The Trials Of Van Occupanther.}

The album originated as a series of jams edited, built upon, and reconstructed by the band by David Friedman, and as such Wayne Coyne is less the front man and more just another instrument in the arsenal.  Missing the front man as a narrative, the songs feel as if they are built on random, experimental structures. Not quite virtuosic, the bass, drums, and guitar demonstrate a complex interplay that alludes to a band playing live as opposed to constructing an album. No doubt it’ll translate amazingly well to the stage.  And there is a hollow spookiness to the album.  Like a walk in a forest of artificial trees.  The big drums and glowing, shimmering backgrounds reference other big drums, other multi-tracked vocals and other electronic pianos and acoustics.  The Flaming Lips have this ability to sound frazzled and disjointed as well as, well, gentrified.  “I Could Be A Frog” does this as well as any other track on Embryonic. And like their best songs, it hangs a curtain of melancholy behind the childlike awe that pervades its own non-linearity.  “Silver Trembling Hands” slackens its urgency behind a veil of soul and R&B inflected rock in the seemingly disjointed chorus.  It works so well though.   

At their best, The Flaming Lips create strobing psychedelia that makes you think they are condensing, archiving and curating their first wave source materials (Can, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Doors, The Mothers of Invention) in such a way that they are creating something new.  When it works, it’s great and a testament to the band. Part of the album-as-reconstructed-and-enhanced-jam-session method they used on Embryonic is that many of the 18 tracks feel like pieces of music that would have made great intros or outros were they shorter or more cohesively assembled.  Tracks like “Sagittarius Silver Announcement” and “Gemini Syringes” work, but are ultimately less than high points.  You get the feeling that the band really likes them, and you want to really like them, but they just miss the mark, lacking something.  Call it structure, or artistic rigor, ultimately these songs show a driven band being lackadaisical, throwing out flabby aesthetics in place of actual content.

Ultimately Embryonic is a strong album.  It showcases a band that can make movies, fill venues, and make sprawling rock albums that fall indiscriminately on the pop vs. experimental continuum. It doesn’t break any new ground for the band, but it does reinforce their strengths and proves that a band can continue to thrive while just basically doing its own thing.  If that’s not an inspiration, then I dunno what is.

_{*to order a furry deluxe version of Embryonic go to the Flaming Lips website}