Chattanooga Pulse

The Flaming Lips
Embryonic
(Warner Bros.)

There’s a saying among comedians which goes, “If everybody laughs, you aren’t doing your job.”  It takes the idea of comedy as something beyond mere delight—it has the ability to provoke and challenge and divide.  Similarly, I find an odd comfort when I hear or read comments from devotees, in response to any type of art, that essentially say, “I don’t get it.”  It means that the artist is defying expectations, for better or for worse.  In the case of the Flaming Lips, musical departures have been very good for them.  The first happened in the late ’90s, when the band went from a pretty good, kinda weird, semi-psychedelic fuzz-pop-rock band to a micro-tweaked, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, expansive studio project, starting with the astoundingly dense Zaireeka and the band’s second breakthrough, The Soft Bulletin.

The Flaming Lips’ latest album, Embryonic, may not be an easy sell, but it quite possibly is the best thing the group has ever made.  There’s an overarching wicked feeling to the album, and much of it sounds dirtied-up—in particular, the drums are almost always distorted.  The point more »