If ‘Yoshimi battles the pink robots’ was about the fight between the girl and the death, with all these ‘she’ in the lyrics, ‘Embryonic’ could be the fight between the girl and the free will.
‘Embryonic’ (2009), the 12th album of the Flaming Lips, is a weird and freaky beast. I mean at this point they are almost untouchable, they have reached commercial success with ‘The soft Bulletin’ and ‘Yoshimi battles the pink robots’, and the critics like them. ‘Embryonic’ was favorably received despite the fact there is almost no real memorable tune. No ‘Yoshimi’, no anthem à la ‘Do you Realize’ here, but do we need one anyway? Instead we have these layers of weird sounds, which are taking so many directions, so many interesting and bold paths.
It is ambitious, quite long (70 minutes, it is supposedly a double album), with slow and frenetic moments, electronic and symphonic parts, distortion and screaming guitars, unexpected screeches, interrupting harmonies. It’s abstract music for our brain, for the left and the right sides.
With the haunting bass line of ‘Powerless’, the fury of ‘The Ego’s Last Stand’ bursting in the middle of the song, the metallic, monumental and epic sound of ‘Worm Mountain’ (featuring MGMT), the cacophonic, fantastically energetic and almost lyric-less ‘Aquarius Sabotage’, ‘Embryonic’ has these grandiose sound effects and these familiar and powerful drum beats.
The obvious melodies are often forsaken, the lyrics are sparse and the instrumental parts are long. Accessible to the masses? Yes and no, for the most part, not really. I must say I did not listen to this album a lot when it came out and had a tendency to find it kind of too experimental and distant for me.
This album seemed at first too vast and too complex for me to describe with too many bizarre moments and a blending of all the songs.
And I had never seen such nihilist lyrics with the Lips ‘You think the forces have control/Well, there are no forces/And they have no control’ proclaims a voice in ‘Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast’. This is some dark album, with a sinister, fatalist and menacing tone: ‘Those people are evil/And they’ll hurt you if they can’ sings Wayne in ‘Evil’
The opening track ‘Convinced of the hex’ announces right away the tone:
‘She said you think there’s some system/That controls and effects/I believe in nothing
And you’re convinced of the hex/I believe in nothing/And you’re convinced of the hex/That’s the difference between us’
In the Flaming Lips’ world, there are no answers to find in spirituality or in science, which opens more questions than gives answers as the spoken words in ‘Gemini syringes’ seem to pretend. But once the ego is crushed, this aimless journey at the search of our mind (‘The Ego’s Last Stand’), you can see glimpses of hope: ’No one is ever really powerless’ (‘Powerless’) or ‘People are evil, it’s true/ But on the other side they can be gentle too/If they decide’ (‘If’), and you can pretend to be whatever you want (‘I Can Be a Frog’), in one word, you are free: ‘We can be free/Free to be evil/Free to believe/Free to be slaves now/To this silver machine’ (‘Sagittarius Silver Announcement’).
But they keep the most accessible for the end since the last track ‘Watching the Planets’ will certainly please those who did not know the Flaming lips of ‘Zaireeka and ‘Clouds taste metallic’. ‘Watching the Planets’, the powerfully operatic conclusion of the album (and may be the only catchy tune of the whole experience) is a giant human heartbeat, beating till the end on the same tempo, a rebirth after all these dark moments. A realization, in a glorious style, there are no answers to find:
‘Oh, oh, oh finding the answer/Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh/Finding that there ain’t no answer to find
Oh, oh, oh, watching the planets/Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh/Oh, oh, oh, watching the planets align
oh, oh, oh, building a fire/Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh/Oh, oh, oh, burning the Bible tonight’
I expect to see a Kubrickian embryo floating in space, an optimistic rebirth just like in the video they made for the song, a new beginning for stronger men and women who have accepted their ignorance about the world and the absence of meaning in it. The planets may meaninglessly align themselves but signs (five song titles have an astrological sign in it) are absurd and pointless.
These Fearless Freaks have reached Freedom not without a Fight ‘She forgets about the fear’ (‘Silver trembling hands’). But if it is a renaissance of mankind, it is still under its embryonic form.