Tag: Flaming Lips

The Flaming Lips – Embryonic

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EMBRYONIC TRAYRating: ★★★☆☆

I’ll be the first to admit that after listening to At War with the Mystics a few years back, I fully expected Embryonic, the new album from The Flaming Lips to be one of the worst albums I would come across this year.  Yea, I lost the faith, and like others, I was pleasantly suprised when I got my hands on the album.  A few spins in, and I dug it.

For the first few moments, you can tell that the shift of the group has gone towards a less pop-centric approach to writing.  Gone from the opening moments are the anthemic pop songs one would expect to hear coming from Wayne’s mouth as he walked across a crowd in a bubble.  Still, the one thing that makes me reluctant to go full on into this conglomerate of sounds, which is really what the first few tracks are, is that I heard this all before.  Sure, the Lips can pull it off, but it reminds me an awful lot like that Battles album from a few years back.

Then comes “Evil,” which starts out as mere noise samples, then goes into traditional song structure, and then fades back into the samples once again. Unfortunately, it’s not really a classic song approach for the band, and you won’t get a chance to really hear them pull off in that direction again until “I Can Be a Frog,” but you really don’t get too far into the song itself, due to the fact that you’re spending most of your time trying to catch the noises that correlate to Wayne’s lyrics.  Even “Silver Trembling Hands” isn’t a straight-forward song, and it was the single.  Take out the vocals, and you have the rest of the album in your hands.  No lie.

So what makes up the majority of this album you might ask?  Well, if I were The Flaming Lips, and I were constructing this album, or explaining away its secret recipe, I would do it as such:  2 Parts Flaming Lips, 1 Parts M83, 1 Parts Battles, 1 Part Liars/Deerhunter, 2 Pandering to Noise Fans, 1 Part Throwaways.  You probably bake it in the studio for several years just to make it come out the way you want.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the lack of originality on this album, as far as where my ears hear the sounds coming from, is that very few people could execute an album precisely the way this group did.  Their fusion of sampling, pop, psychedelia, jazz, noise, etc comes off successfully, without really exhibiting  a lull in the album.  If anyone could construct such a concept in their mind, and then pull if off, it had to be the guys that put together Zaireeka.

Sure, there aren’t any classic gems, like most of us really wanted to get the band to toss our way, but there is no denying that beneath the sinister construction of this noise, something beautiful will come to fruition.  Will I be the one to see that beauty?  Maybe so.  As of now, I’m still trying to figure out who on Warner Brothers tried to explain Embryonic to the bosses on behalf of The Flaming Lips because I’m having trouble enough explaing it to myself, let alone anyone who reads this.

[audio:https://austintownhall.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/03-silver-trembling-hands-1.mp3]

Download: Flaming Lips – Silver Trembling Hands [MP3]

FT50: Albums of the ’00s

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0828top5coverWhat?   You still listen to THAT album?  That record is so 2004!  Well, that’s okay, because we really like that one too, which is why we decided to come up with a list of our favorite albums of the last decade (2000-2009).  Sure, these might not be YOUR favorite records, or the most critically acclaimed, but we sat down and really thought out every record from the past ten years that we keep coming back to in our collections.  You’re likely to disagree with some of these, and we won’t tell you we’re absolutely right we just know that these happen to be OUR favorites.  If you think we totally blew it here, feel free to tell us so, but be nice, as our egos are kind of fragile.  Follow the jump for more.

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Pop Levi – Never Never Love

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Rating: ★★★½☆

It’s hard not to be a fan of really good pop music, especially with the output of independent artists bringing great pop to our ear; Pop Levi is just another such character in a long line of pop musicians leaving good bands (Ladytron) to go it their own in the pop world.

Now on his second album, I’ve come to expect great things from this character, despite his tendency to look like a side-show Shakespearean actor.  However, the output here is too similar to the debut album to substantially increase his value in the pop lexicon of the music industry.

His voice is quite unique, which makes it hard to distinguish changes in pitch from song to song, as his falsetto reverberates in the caverns of my mind. Even here, it seems like more effects are being used to help shape is voice, although more of that is owed to the various samples and instrumentation that weighs this album down.

There are some exceptional tracks present throughout this record, and the spacing is appropriate so as to keep our interest from start to finish.  “Semi-babe” slows it down just enough to mimic an Albert Hammond Jr. ballad.  It’s a different spin on his tried and true formula, immediately creating one of the more memorable moments on Never Never Love. “Mai Space” also has a similar magic to it, even though I feel as if the samples here were directly rooted in Flaming Lips Yoshimi nostalgia.

There are some missteps here too, which keeps this album from rising to the surface of a pleasant breakthrough album in 2008. Pop Levi‘s desire to imitate such greats as Prince tend to show him at his weakest moments, and frankly, his most unoriginal.  Similarly, “Calling Me Down” represents a change in direction from traditional stylings, for this artist at least.  When he slows it down this slow, he loses ground with his audience, which is fair enough considering the album should probably stop before the closing song, “Fountain Of Lies;” the greatest mistake I noticed.

Throughout the record, I hoped and prayed, that he could hold onto the strength of the opening bit of this album.  I admire his efforts to go beyond his comfort level into new areas of pop where he was yet to traverse, but in doing so, he loses what grabbed me during his debut.  What I expected to be extremely experimental in the pop vein of things, ended up retracing the steps of his past glories; when he steps off this path, he falls too far off, leaving us waiting for him back on the trail to pop glory.

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