Send "Flaming Lips " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Over its seven-year gestation, Christmas on Mars had come to represent everything wonderful and frustrating about the Flaming Lips. As much as we loved the idea of Wayne Coyne producing a sci-fi flick in his backyard with hardware-store materials, the Lips' musical production became less frequent-- and less consistent-- during its making. 2006's scattershot At War With the Mystics tried to cut down on the lightness of their two previous landmark albums but was largely overwhelmed by cloying singles ("The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song", "Free Radicals") that felt like little more than excuses to shoot off their confetti cannons. The trio's desire to produce crowd-pleasing spectacle-- whether on stage or on film-- had seemingly taken priority over their desire to be a band.But when Christmas on Mars finally surfaced in late 2008, it came with a peace offering to fans longing for a return to the band's bizarro roots: a full-length soundtrack of unsettling instrumentals that conjured the film's icy desolation. Now, rather than close a chapter on this seven-year saga, the Flaming Lips have taken a dramatic left turn with their Mystics follow-up-- the double album Embryonic is the band's most audacious undertaking since 1997's Zaireeka. The sprawling 70-minute marathon ruminates on themes of madness, isolation, and hallucinogenic horror, translating them into an unrelentingly paranoid, static-soaked acid-rock epic. Embryonic actually feels like it was produced in one of Christmas on Mars' hermetic space-station labs, with squelching equipment that takes a few moments to warm up and frequent instructional studio chatter that gives the impression of a subject under observation....full text |
| Bbc |
| The Flaming Lips have called theirs an “accidental career”, which is one way of summing up the haphazard nature of their quarter-century trajectory, lurching from breakthrough radio hits like 1993’s She Don’t Use Jelly to quadraphonic experimentation on 1997’s Zaireeka, their only consideration apparently to do whatever the hell they feel like at any given moment. And so Oklahoma’s finest have decided to follow the commercially successful triptych of The Soft Bulletin (1998), Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002) and At War With the Mystics (2006) with a double-CD of their least accessible material since, well, Zaireeka. Of course, being the Lips, even amid the squalls of noise and synth surges, there are beauteous melodies, but there are no accessible space-soul song-suites as per At War..., nor is there a Do You Realize?? on this 18-track collection. The closest things are The Impulse, a gorgeous simple chord sequence with a vocoder’d top-line melody that sounds like something off Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak, and IF, an odd little fractured ballad sung by multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd that sounds like something from the Alex Chilton or Skip Spence twilight zones....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Over the past decade, the Flaming Lips have steadily built their following to the point that they now exist both in the underground and on the fringe of the mainstream. They’ve achieved this rather remarkable feat by releasing a trio of albums that adhere to a similar blueprint: add one part sentimental ballads, one part bombastic rockers, and one part instrumental freakouts, and you’ve got a latter-day Flaming Lips LP. It’s all become a bit formulaic, yes, but a winning recipe to be sure. But predictable is a word that should never apply to the Flaming Lips, and any mold that they might have been creating within is completely shattered with Embryonic, the first double LP from the Oklahoma City pioneers. No, there are no weepy ballads à la “Waitin for a Superman” or “Do You Realize??” Nope, there are no catchy pop-rockers in the vein of “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song”. Hell, there are only a few tracks with anything resembling a conventional song structure. You’d have to go all the way back to 1997’s Zaireeka to find a Lips album that is comparable in terms of artistic vision. But whereas Zaireeka was just as much artistic gimmick as artistic statement (if you recall, it was comprised of four CDs designed to be played simultaneously), Embryonic is 100% the latter. Combining the Lips’ long-time fascinations with early Pink Floyd-inspired psychedelia, science fiction, and long instrumental interludes, Embryonic often sounds like the soundtrack for a futuristic space movie. This, perhaps, might be due to their recent experience scoring their own such movie, Christmas on Mars. To be sure, Embryonic often sounds more like early ‘70s Miles Davis than the product of a band that cut its teeth on punk rock—and that’s certainly a compliment. From the first track to the last, the Lips test the boundaries of what it means to write a song. Album opener “Convinced of the Hex”, for example, technically follows a verse/chorus structure, but the music is so ambient and the vocals so understated that it feels more like a mood piece than a rock song, effectively demoting the electric guitar’s role to mere shards of sound while showcasing retro synthesizers and vibes....full text |
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