Bidding farewell to the robots and the warring mystics, The Flaming Lips’ 12th studio album, Embryonic, was a neo-psychedelic leviathan. With songs that pulsated in a mass of krautrock-inspired tentacles, free-jazz eyeballs, and venomous sacs of noise-rock, this sprawling double album splits some people right down the middle – and yet, unsurprisingly, that’s exactly what the band hoped for.
With frontman Wayne Coyne’s voice echoing from deep within this primordial audio soup, The Flaming Lips tackled Embryonic like a group of zoo-dwelling doulas on an acid trip. Turning away from the more accessible psych-pop of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots in favour of an ebullient, experimental jamfest, Embryonic set out to lure listeners into a never-ending maze of disjointed soundscapes, leaving a trail of bewildered fans in its wake.
Here, then, is the story of Embryonic, and how The Flaming Lips expanded their universe and set off for strange new dimensions.
Listen to ‘Embryonic’here.
The backstory: “Our fans would rather see us fail spectacularly than play it safe”
Shortly after the release of their 11th record, At War With The Mystics, The Flaming Lips knew that they wanted their follow-up to be a double album. A rite of passage for many rock groups, accruing enough quality material to fill four sides of vinyl is often a fraught affair leading to accusations of pretentiousness. “Double albums usually fall into a couple of categories… indulgent, egotistical or lazy,” Wayne Coyne later told The Quietus. “They are almost always summed up as ‘would have made a better single album if only the artist would have focused themselves, edited themselves, and got down to work and trimmed the fat’.”
After identifying the pitfalls of such an endeavour, Coyne decided that he simply didn’t care what the naysayers had to say. “Let’s make a double record before we turn back into the insecure humans we know we really are,” he insisted, “for at the moment we’ve become fearless beasts with a wicked new machine.” Recognising that fear of failure can hold a lot of artists back – particularly for commercially successful bands such as The Flaming Lips, whose following had only grown since the release of the group’s critically-lauded breakthrough, 1999’s The Soft Bulletin – Coyne decided the band should set out to do the exact opposite of what people expected of them.
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Remarkably, this meant that even the group’s usual songwriting process was thrown out of the window. Rather than carefully crafting their new songs before entering the recording studio, The Flaming Lips decided to meet at drummer Steven Drozd’s house and engage in longform jamming sessions to see what came out of them. “The jam itself probably went on for maybe 15 minutes or something,” Coyne told NPR. “And when we listened back to it, it really did spark us in a way to think, hey, that’s kind of that sound that we were trying to get.” What appealed about the results was that, unlike with the sessions for The Soft Bulletin or Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, the group weren’t leaning on computer software such as Pro Tools; instead, they were thrashing out spontaneous ideas on the fly.
As these spur-of-the-moment improvisations took them on an unfocused yet highly illuminating psychedelic journey, creative fulfilment became central to the group’s needs. “We felt as though we had found a vehicle that could, at last, take us to a place that was ‘more free’,” Coyne told The Quietus. “It could take us deeper into the dark woods than ever before.” Instead of continuing to make glossy psych-pop for the masses, it was time to do something for themselves. “Our fans would rather see us fail spectacularly than play it safe,” Coyne deduced.
The recording: “It was definitely a conscious decision not to do another glistening pop record”
Moving from Steven Drozd’s home to Tarbox Road Studios, in Cassadaga, New York, and Dull Roar Studios, in the band’s hometown of Oklahoma City, with long-standing producer Dave Fridmann at the controls, The Flaming Lips plunged themselves into the ovum of free-spirited creativity. Armed with a batch of trippy, free-flowing compositions, the band were dead set on upending commercial expectations by indulging in wilfully experimental, mind-warping freakouts. “We weren’t going to worry about writing songs,” Drozd told SPIN magazine. “It was definitely a conscious decision not to do another glistening pop record.”
Spurred on by early demos on which they’d cut loose as if soundtracking an all-nighter at one of Ken Kesey’s infamous 60s Acid Tests, the group fused the cosmic excursions of early Pink Floyd with the thrust of krautrock pioneers Can on Embryonic’s trance-inducing opener, Convinced Of The Hex. With Coyne barking about “the difference between us” as if in the grip of a hallucinogenic epiphany, it was a wild and unwieldy statement of intent that was as bewitching as it was stupefying.
