This is an album more for the Dr/Astronaut David Bowman’s of today than it is for anyone else. Listen to this album, and picture Bowman’s journey through the monolith/wormhole on his way to becoming the star child, a being of pure energy. It’s refreshing to listen to an album that seems to exist in a vacuum of space that hangs around the rest of the hipper zone of the alternative music industry. While Wayne Coyne and et all were busying themselves with the massive undertaking that was the Christmas on Mars project, they released At War With Mystics, an album that lacked much of the hard and experimental abrasion that the band had built their success upon. Many in opposition to this notion found it to be smooth, and in fact found it an impressive psychedelic journey that sought to expand the mind as Coyne surfed crowds in his bubble “vehicle”. While it certainly did not want for experimentalism, it showed signs of refinement and maturity, as if the band were taking tighter hold of the reigns of their career, steering it with more creative purpose.
Where At War with Mystics played the role of a spaceship just breaking the atmosphere of our precious Earth, passing what would be our eventually-bombed moon, and out of the solar system, Embryonic takes this celestial journey past space’s dark depths, and eventually moving through an intense and almost interdimensional journey. If there’s one reason for admiring the Flaming Lips it’s the massive spirited journey they seem to have put themselves on since the onset of their work with The Soft Bulletin, clearly making the effort to clean up their sound into something.
Despite this effort towards refinement, how is it that it the album comes across as scattershot, and downright nutty? And to pose a completely un-related question, how does an album that contains spoken word components by an actual mathmetician (Thorsten Wormann if you were wondering) kick ass? It’s as if the Flaming Lips were saying “To hell with it, let’s just go crazy and have fun with it…but lets be smart about it also”. Their seasoned status and more mature mode of life these days has been allowed to seep into the album’s pores. What has come out of the oven of Wayne Coyne’s musical mind is a starburst candy for the musically-inclined. The aural tones of the music presented have a way of gliding both organically and wildly across the mindscape.
Unofficially, this is a cosmic-themed concept album that makes the effort to sail through a universe teeming with lush with colors, dimly-lit nebulas, and stoically dark black space…sailing past Virgo with the tracks “Virgo Self Esteem Broadcast” and “Scorpio Sword”. Whether with these tracks, or it’s companions, there is nothing anthemic about this album, this a raw and freeform exploration from one plane of existence to another, as suggested by the tone and lyrics that reflect the wormhole scene from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. At times, and in multiple tracks, the material from this project sounds as if Coyne is singing from across the room. This gives off the vibe that the whole band is playing together in one common space, tight knit, and intimate, reflecting the journey present in their album’s message. Other times, in it’s more still and not-quite-bleak moments there is a level of ominous feel to be had. Tracks like “Your Bats” seem fueled from energy somewhere deep in the band’s collective heart. “If” and “The Sparrow Looks Up at the Machine” sing of newborn innocence observed by another, as if by a distance. These songs, and their descriptions that lay here, they are a seemingly, but not actually, random collective of material that have a way of propping the recesses of the mind. While some songs jerk at the mind in many places, others will move you along at a gentle and exploratory pace.
Embryonic is an experiment mind-boggling wonder that has the power in it to make one question what it is about this work that makes it so striking. It’s powerful, full of color its…full of stars.
(9.0/10)
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