The second thing to note is the lineup. Wayne is here on guitar, Michael Ivins (the other mainstay of the group) is on bass, Richard English is on drums ... and Wayne's brother Mark is on vocals. The very presence of somebody other than Wayne serving as vocalist for the group already makes this release a curiousity, but this is made all the more fascinating by how Mark is so thoroughly uninteresting as a singer. He's not actively obnoxious, and he doesn't make the album unlistenable, but he doesn't show much in the way of range, and the sound of his voice is awfully dull. Mark would leave after the album, and Wayne's voice (which isn't technically impressive either but at least shows gobs of personality) would then become a staple of the band.

This EP (about 25 minutes in length) contains but 5 songs, and they're nothing if not faithful tributes to the psychedelic, proto-art-rock that made up the Nuggets 2 boxset. These songs, were they to have made it onto that boxset, wouldn't have been in the top tier of that set, but they would have fit in pretty seamlessly with the bulk of the set, and that has to deserve some level of credit. It's really fascinating how well they did their homework; it's all based in garage rock, but there are goofy fade-ins/fade-outs, trippy vocal harmonies, "cosmic" guitar effects and so on. It's no Chips from the Chocolate Fireball (a similar mid-80s tribute to 60s British psychedelia, but way better), but it's still pretty nice.

So let's go track by track (not too big a deal with only five to deal with). The opening "Bag Full of Thoughts" is propelled by a quintessential acid-garage-rock growling riff (with jangly guitar on top, naturally), with Mark contributing an, uh, "atmospheric" vocal part. There's a fun guitar solo in the middle, too. "Out for a Walk" inexplicably samples "All You Need is Love?" near the beginning before switching into a stomping mid-tempo rocker, where all the phasing in the bass and guitars is pretty much the only interesting feature (it's sure not the vocals). "Garden of Eyes/Forever is a Long Time" starts with a lengthy bass-driven buildup (with bits of guitar noise and off-kilter harmonies around it) before switching into an up-tempo number with popping basslines and what actually resembles a clever, well-delivered vocal part (especially when Mark "stretches" himself by bothering to go up half an octave or so). "Scratchin' the Door" seems to be their tribute to tracks like "Interstellar Overdrive" (except this has vocals), and I'd probably like it more if it lasted about half as long and didn't have such a protracted set of false endings that do little but try my patience. And finally, "My Own Planet" is a fine bit of punkish acid-rock, with a chorus ("I want my own planet/the human race I can't stand it/I want my own planet/'cos this one here is a drag") that's more addictive than anything else on the album. Even Mark's vocals seem at home here; I feel like the cosmic boredom with Earth mentioned in the lyrics is reflected by the relative boredom of Mark's voice, and I like the combination.

Had the band never bothered to release anything after this, this EP likely would have fallen into extreme obscurity, but it still likely would have found a home in the hearts of really hardcore 80s indie-rock buffs. If you think you know the band really well but haven't heard this yet, you should give this a whirl.

The opening "With You" is an easy choice for the album's best, of course; the soft acoustic-driven portions of the song are lovely, the lyrics are already extremely charming, and the build into the loud, chaotic, noisy parts is totally effective. "Unplugged," "Trains, Brains and Rain" and "Just Like Before" are all effective rockers, and they pull it off in noticably different ways even if they're all more or less cut from the same cloth. "Unplugged" (where Wayne sounds like 80s Ray Davies doing a rocker) is driven forward by a fun, goofy 60s-ish riff, "Trains etc" gains some uplift and levity from the mix of acoustic and heavy electric guitars, and "Just Like Before" features a set of guitar lines that milk "angry" 60s psychedelic-garage (the Nuggets 2 vibe again) for all they're worth. They're fun!

I'm not really sold on the other six, though. "Jesus Shooting Heroin" keeps striking me as some sort of epic practical joke on the indie rock community, even though I have no basis to believe that's the case, and it just goes on way too long for such a dull, monotonous tune (basically alternating between the softer parts with "deep" lyrics and the simple angry loud riffs with eerie backing harmonies). "She is Death" has some loveliness to it, but it's not quite effective enough in atmosphere to satisfy me as a mood piece, so I don't love it. Neither "Charles Manson Blues" nor "Man from Pakistan" measure up to the first half rockers for me, and while "Staring At Sound" seems to me like it could have been developed into something better a few years later, it doesn't do much for me (I'm much happier with the reprise of "With You" that comes after). "Godzilla Flick" is pretty nice, though; it's interesting to hear a song where the main hook is putting extra emphasis on the "k" in flick, and there are some great backing harmonies over the guitar lines throughout. So at least the second half isn't a total waste.

Basically, the album shows promise, but the band had a long way to go at this point. If anything, the album makes me admire the long trip the band had to make to get away from the relatively non-descriptness of the music of this album. I guess that's not a huge compliment, but you've gotta take what you can out of life.

On the other hand, growth did lead to "One Million Billionth etc," and that one's no slouch. It goes over 9 minutes but doesn't seem the least bit overlong, which is fascinating given that the band is still firmly sticking to basic instrumentation (and a little bit of piano here and there). Sure, it milks the classic "transitional" 70s Pink Floyd vibe for all its worth, but how many bands that tried to imitate it could do so without sounding like total fools? The journey between softer and louder guitar parts (which sound just as much like live Townshend as they do Gilmour) definitely makes for the band's best arrangement yet.

The rest of the album splits between conventional rockers and conventional ballads, and each of those categories is okayish but not especially remarkable. English actually gets to take lead vocals on a couple of them ("Can't Exist," "Thanks to You"), and he shows that he needed to stick to drumming; dull and mumbly is a poor combination. "Can't Exist" at least has a somewhat striking acoustic-driven chord sequence; "Thanks to You" seems to be a tribute to Led Zeppelin's "Thank You," and that's not something I need in my life. "Ode to C.C. (Part 2)" is a little too short, but it at least has funny lyrics ("I think hell's got all the good bands anyway"), so I'm fine with it. Among the rockers, the opening "Everything's Explodin'" might be awfully conventional, but it's got a really fun melody, and it's the perfect way to preceed the melancholy "Sunday Morning" epic. "Maximum Dream for Evil Knievel" might have one of the most bizarre stop-start sequences of any rocker I've heard, but somehow it works with the banal lyrics about cooking chicken and smoking marijuana, so it can stick around. George Starostin says "The Ceiling is Bendin'" is excessively "borrowed" from an early obscure Alice Cooper song, and I'll take his word for it, but the song is at least interesting enough for me not to want to skip it, even if the fade-in/fade-outs get a little distracting after a while. "Prescription - Love" would have made a decent goofy 3-minute rocker, but the band decided to give it an "epic" 3-minute introduction, which would be fine except that there aren't enough ideas in that passage, either in writing or in arranging. And finally, "Can't Stop the Spring" weirdly intersperses samples from "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" into a decent rocker with another decent riff and some decent slower sections. And yes, the repeated use of "decent" there was intentional.

All in all, this strikes me as a quintessential, "Yeah, it's pretty good, but ..." sort of album. I mean, if a gun were put to my head, I'd say this was the best of the first few albums, but by the same token I could easily see where it could be considered the worst, just because of the few really bad ideas and because of how bland the arrangements become in aggregate. I mean, I like guitars and bass and drums just fine, and the instrumentation sounds fine to me when I listen to the songs individually, but I get way more tired by the end than I'd like.

The album cover's a hoot, though.

The rest of the album isn't quite bad (except for the ridiculous "UFO Story," another terrible attempt on the part of the band to make something avant-garde) so much as it's rather unremarkable. Ok, so "Chrome Plated Suicide" is a bonafide classic (albeit another case of the band's instrumentation cranked to 11 but the sound still seemingly strangely empty), with interesting lyrics and a nice guitar solo and all, and there are a lot of interesting moments, but I once again get kinda tired and impatient when listening to this album. Something about these songs just brings out my inner grump: I'll think, "Yeah, 'Drug Machine in Heaven' is a good throwback to 70s metal, but it sounds way too conventional," or "The channel-to-channel guitar scraping introduction of "Right Now" is a fantastic idea, but the bulk of the song passes me by" or pretty much this line of thinking for most of the album. They had a pretty good thing going in terms of songwriting ("Shaved Gorilla" really doesn't go anywhere, and same goes for a few others, but most of the songs are at least ok), but there's a strange sense of the songs not feeling finished that permeates pretty much the whole album.

Basically, this album makes it pretty clear that, without changes, the band was pretty much not going anywhere (English obviously thought so, as he left afterwards). Sure, I'll feel like listening to "Hare Krishna Stomp" or the songs I've mentioned so far from time to time, but there's no way I'd ever think, "Boy, I'm sure in the mood for Telepathic Surgery." This is probably their worst "normal" album (excluding Once Beyond Hopelessness and whatever EPs they have floating around that I haven't heard), and it makes the quality of the band's 90s albums (especially the early 90 ones) seem even more incredible.

And what a "debut" it is! The messy acoustic number "Stand in Line" reeks a little too much of the sorts of things I disliked in the earlier albums, and maybe there are some passages where the noise carries things for a little too long, but this is an almost ridiculous improvement over what had come earlier. The first five tracks are absolutely stunning and each surpass the band's best work to this point. "Shine on Sweet Jesus" is everything wonderful about the album distilled into a single track: a goofy carnival organ at the beginning, an almost overwhelming assault of guitar noise, a vocal melody that, um, challenges Wayne's upper range, and Wayne's goofy approach to singing about Jesus. "Unconsciously Screaming" and "Raining Babies" are top-notch anthemic rockers, and Wayne's vocals are once again well-served by the solid foundation of guitar noise underneath him. The albums before this one sure wouldn't have had anything as glorious as the downward cascade of guitar lines in the chorus of "Raining Babies," that's for sure.

"Take Meta Mars" is often cited as the band doing something similar to Can's "Mushroom Head," and the reason is that this was, in fact, the band's attempt to make something similar to that track after having heard it once. The rhythmic groove is nearly as hypnotic as that of its amazing predecessor, and the combination of Wayne's vocals and the eerie synths in the background makes for a great atmosphere. "Five Stop Mother Superior Rain," then, is the band's tribute to 70s glam ballads, and it's spectacular from top to bottom. Maybe it's slightly cheap to tug at nostalgic heartstrings by mentioning the asassinations of JFK and John Lennon, but it somehow works, and the chorus, lifted to a whole other level by the OH SO GLORIOUS slide guitar work, definitely lifts the song into the upper echelon of Lips songs. If you don't feel a twinge in this song, you should just stop listening to rock music.

The second half is a step down from the first, but not too much. "Stand in Line" isn't so great, but "God Walks Among Us Now" is a top-notch intense noise-rocker, with a great distortion effect on Wayne's vocals that makes him sound way more badass than he could otherwise. And the noise, oh the glorious noise. "There You Are" is a return to the pretty, slightly non-descript acoustic ballads that popped up from time to time in the first few albums, but the fact that it's so different from the rest of the material of the album (as opposed to how similar songs on the first few albums tended to occur often enough that they became a bit samey) makes it more effective than it might otherwise be. "Mountain Side" is a crushingly heavy rocker, and while I do find myself drifting a bit during some of the longer noise passages, it's impossible for me to have bad feelings towards a song that does something so goofy in its lyrics. Yup, it may be eye-rolling to use the phrase "*blank* of love" once in a song, and stupid to use it twice, but using it four times ("plane crash of love"/"windshield of love"/"bathtub of love"/"plane crash of love") loops around to hilarious awesomeness (is that a word? It is now!), and I love the song for it. And finally, the band's cover of "What a Wonderful World" does a terrific job of balancing the earnest happiness of the original (there's no irony in the delivery here) with the noisy glory that had made up the rest of the album, and I wouldn't end the album in any other way.

And so ended the band's indie-rock days. There are actually a lot of people who consider this the band's peak, and it goes without saying that any serious Lips fan needs this album. I should note, though, that if you want this album, the best way to get it is in the 2-CD compilation, The Day They Shot a Hole in the Jesus Egg. I made the mistake of trying to find the album itself for a long time, and it's because of this that Priest came into my collection relatively late. Aside from the Priest album, there are tracks from a pre-album EP of "Unconsciously Screaming" and 3 other tracks, and a bunch of demos/early versions from this album.

In terms of song quality, I don't know how many people would agree with me, but I feel like the album has a kind of bizarro mirror image thing going on that I can't recall happening on any other album I know. The album starts on an absolutely tremendous note, then fills out the first half with four songs that, while all very good, never quite make it to great for me. The second half, then, whips out four total winners in a row before kinda crashing in the last track (and this is without accounting for the noisefest hidden track, which I'm ignoring for the purposes of rating the album). It's one of the weirdest symmetries I've ever come across, that's for sure.

So as mentioned, the opening track ("Talkin' 'Bout the Smiling etc") is incredible, and it's definitely on the shortlist for my very favorite Lips tracks. It may start off as noisy and as powerful as any Lips track (and the noisy guitar break in the middle is pure ecstasy), but its greatest and most notable feature is the way they took the goofy ultra-low-pitched vocal sound they liked to break out from time to time and built the main groove of the entire song around it. The alternation between the incessant low-pitched "doo wop wop" and Wayne's fantastic vocal melody makes this a ridiculously fun song to sing to, especially with fascinating lyrics like "The feeling in my head starts heading south/it seems it stops the fever from shooting out of my mouth/life gushing all around." And don't forget the weirdly appropriate choir that keep coming in and out.

The next four tracks don't come close to the opener, but they're all pretty nice. "Hit Me Like You Did The First Time" has never been one of my favorites on the album, and I find something a little unsatisfying about the hook at the end of each verse, but there's something fairly adorable about the playful late-60s-ish strings, and I definitely like the song more than I used to. "The Sun" sounds pretty much exactly like I'd expect from a tribute to 60s psychedelia by early 90s Flaming Lips, and the trumpet is a really nice touch. "Felt Good to Burn" doesn't really have much of a melody, but it makes for a good low-key atmosphere, and there's something awfully warming about the "I wasn't waving goodbye, I was saying hello" line. And finally, "Gingerale Afternoon" is a nice enough little brother to "Talkin' 'Bout," though it sure seems odd to me that the last minute of a 3:45 song would feel like an extended vamp/fadeout.

The second half, then, is where the album gets a big boost in rating (except for the discomforting closer "Hold Your Head," which just doesn't fit the mood and feel of the rest of the album at all). "Halloween on the Barbary Coast" is a multi-part 6-minute epic (apparently about the band looking terrible while standing in line at a casino), and everything about it, starting from the opening massive anthemic guitar lines and moving through all the bits of sonic and melodic fun the band throws in, makes it into a top-notch piece of work. "The Magician vs the Headache" is top-notch power pop with great Lips-ish touches (like the simultaneous use of Wayne's normal voice, the goofy low-pitched vocals and high-pitched guitar sounds that almost sound like a person trying to imitate a chipmunk), and while the pounded staccato guitar noises at the end would make for a terrible half hour, they make for a fantastic 15 seconds at song's end. "You Have to be Joking" isn't quite on the same tier as "Five Stop Mother Superior Rain" among Lips acoustic-based ballads, but it's very close, and it's definitely a serious step up even from "There You Are" (which I liked quite a bit). Plus, the use of the sample from Brazil seems very inspired here. And finally, in what universe would "I'm looking at the sky/I'm waiting on the rain/I'm waiting for the frogs to fall down on me" not be an absolutely perfect pop chorus? "Frogs" has this and plenty more, especially that quivering noisy guitar part underneath that fascinates me with how willing it is to stay in the background and blend with the scenery.

Basically, this album may not be a big improvement over Priest, but it showed they were pointed in the right direction. Their songwriting and arranging skills had gotten strong enough that they no longer needed to use awesome, inventive guitar noise as a crutch, and this put them in a position where, when Donahue (and the drummer) departed after this album, they could not only survive but thrive. I can't imagine somebody liking early 90s rock and not liking this at least somewhat.

The album's big hit, of course, was "She Don't Use Jelly," a song that gained the band a bit of a novelty-ish reputation. The title and the most-cited line ("She don't use jelly or any of these/she uses vaseline") makes it seem like it has to be a dirty song, but what's funny to me is that, other than that line, there's absolutely nothing about the song that's even remotely offensive. It's basically a perfect puritan troll: "What's so bad about this? It's about a girl dyeing her hair with fruit juice!!" It helps that the vocal melody is so infectious, and the slide guitar breaks are just about perfect.

The other pop ballads are just as great, though. Ok, the cover of "Plastic Jesus" is a little throwaway-ish (though amusing, and the way they keep the left channel almost dead until they bring in the synth strings sounds great to me), but "Chewin the Apple of Your Eye" (from which the page's tagline comes) is top-notch as far as "made to sound like it was played and sung into a tape recorder" ballads go. George Starostin once remarked this sounds like it comes from a collection of John Lennon demos, and he's right: the song nails the kind of vibe and sound Lennon tended towards, right down to the whistling at the end. Plus, I can't help loving a song with this melody and lyrics such as, "It's like at the circus/when you get lost in the crowd/you're happy but nervous/definite sign that you've lost it." "Oh My Pregnant Head" (the other side of the "She Don't Use Jelly" sandwich) has some pounding drumming and neat guitar effects, but it's still ultimately a lovely swaying ballad, albeit a deceptively strange one, and it's miles above any ballad from the 80s albums.

The other glimpse of a ballad comes in the beginning of "Moth in the Incubator," and this part isn't especially great, but that's ok because the other parts of the song are. The noisy stomping mid-section pulls off a fascinating combination of crunchy and swaying, and when the end section appears, with that happy and dance-y jig guitar line that pops up, it's one of my favorite moments on an album full of great moments. The rest of the album, then, is noisy guitar-driven pop-rockers, and all six are winners. The opening "Turn it On" makes it clear that the band is in top form in the melody-writing department, and I really dig the way the intensity slowly builds during the multiple repetitions of the chorus near the end (it succeeds in a way that "Gingerale Afternoon" slightly failed). And when the expected "astral" guitar noises come up near the end, aaaah man it's a lovely rush. "Pilot Can at the Queer of God" tops it, though, riding an infectious groove (combining a great heavy guitar/bass part and some lovely high-pitched guitar noises on top) until the instrumentation fades into the background while the vocals stay in the forefront singing, "And now she's got helicopters"/"Yes she has" as it floats from channel to channel.

"Superhumans" almost seems like relative filler when I think about it outside of actually listening to it, but I think it's neat how they get such an anthemic feel out of verses that consist of two lines repeated twice, and the noisier guitar parts are a hoot, so I have to say I enjoy it enough not to consider it too much of a let down. "Be My Head" is pure bouncy goofy noisy guitar pop bliss, and when the music stops so the low-pitched voice can sing "Won't you" before a repetition of the chorus, I'm as happy as I ever am from listening to the band. And "When Yer Twenty Two" does a great job of milking a bass-heavy power groove (with pleasant piano for texture here and there) while attaching yet another solid vocal melody. Plus, while the guitar noises that last until the end aren't quite as glorious as some of Donahue's best work, they make for a rather satisfying end to the song.

Ultimately, though, it's the beautiful oomph of "Slow Nerve Action" that ensures this album the grade it gets. Drozd's drum groove is every bit as career-defining as was Bonham's groove on "When the Levee Breaks" (and they're smart enough to let this groove finish off the album) the sound of that slow growling guitar line that lays its own groove is heaven sent, and yet Wayne manages to come up with a vocal melody that could have belonged to a perfectly reasonable pop ballad had he so desired. If "Talkin' Bout ..." captured the very best of this era of the band in an up-tempo form, then this captures that best in the form of a mid-tempo, powerful beast.

Basically, this is my favorite album of the 1990s. Maybe this means that I haven't heard enough 90s albums, but what I know is that it does a lot of things very well that I value highly in rock music (regardless of era), and that's enough for me. If the first thing you think of with this era of the band is "She Don't Use Jelly," pick this up and hear how much further they went than that (admittedly classic) song. If you buy this album and don't like it, well, early 90s Flaming Lips probably isn't for you.

The good news is that the band's songwriting is working at a pretty jaw-dropping level on this album, not just in quality but also in the style shift. Whereas the last few albums still had the band leaning more towards the rock side of things, this album is packed with gorgeous, mid-tempo ballads, with some bits of mid-tempo-ish pop rock thrown in for good measure. In terms of individual song quality, this might well be the best Flaming Lips album ever, and in the Transmissions/Clouds debate, this one seemingly has just as many supporters as Transmissions for that reason. The "bad" news is that this album is much more difficult for me to get through in one sitting than should be the case when the individual songs are so good (a good comparison that just popped into my head is with Procol Harum's A Salty Dog, even if that sounds completely different from this album). There's WAY too much mid-tempo music on here, lovely and/or rocking as it may be, and there's also something that seems a little off to me about the way Jones is used on this album. His noisy guitar sounds make their way into as many nooks and crannies as they can muster, and they mostly sound fine, but they don't always sound to me like they belong there, and the way they're used definitely gives an unfortunate monolithic feel to the album (especially in the middle). It's like the band was instinctually gravitating towards music that should have less of a guitar presence, but didn't want to let go of what they'd known to this point. If it's possible for somebody to be featured and an afterthought, I think that was Ronald Jones on this album.

Basically, though, these are just reasons that I can't rate it on the level of Transmissions, much as I'd like to. The album is freaking magnificent beyond these reservations, and a more positive attitude towards it seems right. "The Abandoned Hospital Ship" may abandon the tendency towards opening with an up-tempo rocker, but a slow gorgeous number (albeit packed with guitar noise in the second half) as the opener seems to fit the album fine. "Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles" probably could have worked as the opener, what with the long epic introduction, but it's a great second track, and features a 60s pop-style vocal melody that can compete with any top-notch Nuggets track, and man those are some fun guitar parts. And ... oh gosh, there's no way I can do a track by track for this. I will say that the album more or less splits from here into the two categories introduced by those two tracks, and both categories are represented by top-notch material. On the ballads side, there's lots of bittersweet playfulness and acoustic guitar amongst the noise, and my favorites are probably the ridiculous "This Here Giraffe" and "Brainville" and the beautiful "Evil Will Prevail" (featuring a top-notch upwards guitar line that serves as a great balance to the tear-jerking verses). On the rockers side, I find myself leaning towards the slow pounding (with a great synth in the background) of "Lightning Strikes the Postman," but "Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World" and "Kim's Watermelon Gun" each have great angry guitar lines concealed inside poppy rocky goodness (especially with all the fun twangy lines in the latter), and they're a total blast.

Of the other tracks, I feel compelled to namecheck two: "Placebo Headwound," where Wayne builds a great ballad around the great philosophical questions that have troubled eight-year-olds since time immemorial, and the closing "Bad Days," a top-notch novelty song about dreaming about living on Mars and killing your boss. And the rest, well, they're just the other high quality tracks of Clouds Taste Metallic, an album full of high quality tracks.

Anyway, this ended up being the last album in the developmental thread that started with Priest, and honestly I'm not too surprised that their direction changed. If they were getting bored with "traditional" guitar rock, even in the weird form they'd shown over the last couple of albums, it was inevitable that they were going to get sick of guitar-based music in general. Regardless, I'm extremely happy to have this album in my life, and I would happily and eagerly recommend it to anybody ... but get Transmissions (and The Soft Bulletin) first.

It seems nearly obligatory to make some commentary on where Zaireeka fits into the grand scheme of things as an ahead-of-its-time idea, or about the social experience of "Zaireeka parties" or thereabouts, so I'll give it a shot. The thing that strikes me most on the whole is that it is an interesting revolutionary idea and breakthrough, but it's a breakthrough that more properly belonged in an earlier era. It's an idea that hearkens back to a time when (a) groups of people, friends or people with common interests, would gather into a single room to listen to a new album (and maybe get baked in the process), and (b) when people would just sit in one spot in front of their stereo, just listen to music and not distract themselves with anything else in the process. The main problem that I see is that this album, the ultimate communal listening experience, came out right before music listening was about to become much more private and much more something that blended with other aspects of life. In other words, how are people supposed to listen to an album like this on their iPods during their commute or at work, unless they cheat and use outside software like I did? Plus, when I play music from my stereo, I'm almost certainly also reading or playing a computer game; I might be paying pretty decent attention to the music, but I'm not in an ideal situation for obsessively tracking how a particular sound is flying from speaker set to speaker set. Essentially, Zaireeka in its proper form might make for an interesting curiousity of an evening with friends, but as far as making it into a regular listening rotation, it's completely impractical.

And so, putting the gimmick aside (and it is a gimmick, no matter how interesting and inventive it might be), the album becomes a very good album on the whole, but with some slightly dull noodly bits and annoying sonic tricks that bring it down a little bit. Ronald Jones left for various reasons after Clouds, reducing the band to a trio (Drozd would now help with guitars and become the lead guitarist in concert; they got a tour-only drummer to supplement him), and this actually seemed to give some new life to the band. Without a full-time guitarist to keep happy and involved, the band was now free to use guitar more sparingly and pack the sound with other things as they'd see fit. And oh boy do they pack it; all of the bits of keyboards, choirs and various effects that we heard in glimpses on previous albums come out in full force here, so much so that it almost sounds like a completely different band from before.

The downside is that this new freedom, combined with the 4-CDs aspect, leads to a bunch of instances where it seems they throw things into the songs without a clear reason other than "Dude this will totally sound neat between these two stereos." Tracks 4 to 6 constitute a significant lull to me for just this reason. I like the basic tune of "A Machine in India," and there are some impressive orchestral swells in there that help make for a fun experience, but try as I might, I cannot come up with a rational argument for making the track last more than 10 minutes that doesn't involve the 4-CDs aspect. "The Train Runs Over the Camel but is Derailed by a Gnat" has a GORGEOUS opening driven by distorted atmospheric guitar (for some reason, I find myself reminded of "Glass Museum" from the Tortoise album Millions Now Living Will Never Die), and it cycles through various interesting parts, but I'm still not sure why we need the long keyboard noodle at the end. "How Will We Know (Futuristic Crescendos)," then, is the one track on the album I come dangerously close to disliking, simply because it's constructed (with extremely high-frequency and low-frequency sounds in various speakers) in a way that's almost designed to inflict pain on the listener. It would just be a pleasant 2-minute interlude otherwise, and I guess these sounds are just another aspect of "the experience," but I always feel a little ill after listening to it.

The rest of the album is pretty great, though. The opening "Okay I'll Admit That I Really Don't Understand" immediately establishes the sonic potential of the album; even when everything is condensed into two speakers, there's just so much interesting stuff going on (the cool bassline, the pounding drumming, the off-kilter pianos, the epic harmonies etc) that it becomes really gripping. "Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now)" (yup that's spelled right) is one of the album's two biggest highlights, taking a (synth?) orchestral line and making it sound like it's from a 1940s-50s movie with questionable audio mastering, and building a mournful atmosphere around it before exploding into the fantastically happy acoustic-and-piano-driven "Your invisible now ..." chorus. The end noodling goes on a little long for my tastes, but it's not enough to dull my love for the track. "Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Despair," about a pilot who commits suicide mid-flight, is a marvelous piece of hopeless atmosphere, with multiple Waynes slightly off from each other and all manner of great keyboard sounds packed in there. And man, there's just something so crushing when Wayne sings the "Why is it so high?" part.

The next three tracks bring the album down, but it ends with a couple of winners, thus assuring the album the grade it gets. "March of the Rotten Vegetables," simply put, is the only drum solo track from any band that I can say that I love. The main synth-driven melody that surrounds the solo is as beautiful as anything else on the album, and when the solo comes in, I find myself transfixed by the sheer rhythmic power of Drozd's playing. Even when the solo starts to edge closer to the obligatory "just bang the crap out of everything around" point, it NEVER loses its rhythmic punch, and the part it would normally turn into that sort of chaos ends up being covered up by angry feedback noises. It's perfect, and I could imagine it being a total showstopper live or in the "Zaireeka experience."

And finally, the band ends on a goofy, uplifting note, with a story of the affections of three dogs towards various chew toys through time. Yup, it's a silly story, but hearing the chorus of "The Big Ol' Bug is the New Baby Now" sung in an almost gospel-ish manner is a total crackup, and there's really no better way for the album to end than with an assault of dog barkings.

Overall, I'd say that this is an album where overreaction towards it doesn't seem right to me. Giving it a top grade when there are several other Lips albums with material just as good or better than what's on here seems silly, and giving it a 0 (like Pitchfork did) when there's stuff like "March of the Rotten Vegetables" here just seems ludicrous. I wouldn't rush out for it, but if you're ever feeling inclined to go through a bit of work to get this into a listening state (or if Wayne ever gets around to a 5.1 Surround Sound remix of it like was promised long ago), definitely grab it.

After listening to this album so many times over the years, it's become kinda easy for me to find nit-picky flaws here and there. "The Observer," a pleasant enough moody instrumental, probably doesn't deserve to be as long as it is; when I saw the band perform this whole album live, it was kinda fascinating to feel the energy start to sag out of the place by the third minute of this song. A lot of the album can be classified as "emotionally manipulative." Some of the songs (especially "A Spoonful Weighs a Ton," which is nonetheless extremely pretty and catchy and fun; "Suddenly Everything Has Changed" has the same issue) have a really choppy flow between the vocals and instrumental parts, where there will seemingly be one line of voice and then eight of instrumental breaks, repeatedly. And honestly, I get a little tired of the album near the end, and the last four songs don't have as much effect on me in context as they do out of it.

But beyond that? The melodies are awesome; the arrangements are tons of fun if you're not a stickler about things being guitar-centric; and the emotional effect of the songs is as strong as whatever they'd done to this point. The singles (not really hits in the least, sadly), "Race for the Prize" and "Waiting for a Superman," are both top-notch, and while "Prize" slightly edges out "Superman" as my favorite due to the playful/anthemic/hypnotic synth breaks, "Superman" totally does the band's "bittersweet ballad" tradition proud, only with pianos instead of guitars. Beyond those, the album is packed with winners. The four song stretch of "The Spark That Bled," "The Spiderbite Song," "Buggin'" and "What is the Light" is just stellar; it's one of the best four song stretches (difficulty: no obvious choices for "best song") in the band's catalogue (I'd put it on the same level as, for instance, the four winners in the second half of Future Head). "The Spark That Bled" is a glorious smooshing of Beatles, Beach Boys and Yes into one track (come on, doesn't the "I stood up and I said yeah!..." section remind you of "I Get Up I Get Down," or the guitar pickings of Steve Howe in "Starship Trooper?"), a lush epic that weirdly never quite feels like it's bashing me over the head with "Hey I'm an epic!!" or thereabouts. "The Spiderbite Song" is the band's ode various calamities that befell them in recent years before the album was made, and "I was glad that it didn't destroy you/How sad that would be/'Cause if it destroyed you/It would destroy me" has to deserve inclusion into the upper echelon of great lengthy choruses. "Buggin'" feels like it should be a "minor" track, what with all of the big anthems on the album, but it's such a neat combination of poppy energy and a great tinkly piano line that I have to stop and wonder if maybe this is secretly one of the top three songs on the album. And "What is the Light," well, that one is super blatant about being a big anthem, but the build feels so natural and so right into the "Looking into space it surrounds you/Love is the place that you're drawn to..." chorus that it's impossible for me not to get sucked into it every time.

After "Observer" and "Superman," as I said, the album dips a bit for me, even if it's hard for me to put my finger on exactly why. For some reason, I find myself preferring "The Gash" most out of this stretch; the opening might be a little too over the top even for my tastes, but the big harmonies and the big groove and the great vocal break of "Will the fight for our sanity/Be the fight of our lives?/Now that we've lost all the reason/That we thought that we had" make for something I can happily listen to over and over. "Suddenly Everything Has Changed" has a lot of beauty in it (and am I completely insane in thinking the song is clearly about somebody trying to go on with their every day lives after somebody close to them has died?) ... but couldn't it have toned down the "WE WILL MAKE A PET SOUNDS TRACK IF IT KILLS US" lengthy synth-string instrumental breaks maybe a bit? Maybe? I also find myself feeling like "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" might vamp a little too long on the chorus at the end ... but then again, the atmosphere is great, and I kinda feel like the amazing atmosphere is the whole point. There are some great lyrics in there, too. And finally, "Sleeping on the Roof" is kind of a weird closer, even if it's a really good ambient-ish instrumental (much better than "The Observer" I think; it has even fewer distinct notes, but it makes better use of them).

And that (aside from nice but slightly pointless remixes of the singles at the end) is another top-notch Flaming Lips album, and an incredible bookend to their 90s work given that its counterpart was In a Priest Driven Ambulance. Honestly, if you've never heard a Flaming Lips album, I would start here: you'll probably like it, and if for some reason you don't (especially if you think it's too light and sissy), you can always go earlier in the decade. If you don't have this album, you're seriously missing out.

So let's get the "Do You Realize?" part of the review out of the way. I probably don't like it as much as everybody else does even if I like it a lot; the closeness in vibe and melody to "Mind Games" has always driven me nuts (how have I NEVER found anybody else who mentions this similarity??), and the lyrics and atmosphere have always made this feel to me like it's the ultimate Soft Bulletin-onward "Flaming Lips Track By Numbers." Here's the thing, though: the band was REALLY in a good stretch at this point, and their By Numbers was going to churn out a masterpiece or two more than most bands' By Numbers. Great lyrics (every bit in the tradition of "Placebo Headwound," though more with answers than questions), great arrangement and great singing aside, you know what little detail I like most? It's how the band starts into a predictable "change key upward for emotional effect" mode, stays there for only a few measures and one repetition of the title, then lowers back into the original key, almost in mockery of the convention. Neat!

Honestly, though, I almost thought about leaving out "Do You Realize?" from the "best song" list for the album, until I realized I'd probably be outsmarting myself in doing so. The one I like at least as much as "Do You Realize" is "Are You A Hypnotist??" and its shiny atmospheric guitar plucks and its neo-Floydian chorus (featuring one of the best Mellotron-chorus patches I know of). Yup, even if this has nothing in common with it on the superficial level, the impact of "The sun's eclipsed behind the clouds" comes from the same reservoir as the impact of "I'll see you on the dark side of the moon," and it's kinda neat to me that Wayne could deftly tap into that without making anything that could be accused of direct plagiarism.

Unfortunately, direct plagiarism is an issue on this album, and I'm not just talking about my insistence that "Do You Realize" draws *ahem* inspiration from "Mind Games." If you don't know about the controversy concerning the opening "Fight Test" and the old Cat Stevens song, "Father and Son," I suggest that you listen to that song and "Fight Test" back to back; the short version is that Cat Stevens was awarded 75% of the royalties related to the song. Honestly, I don't think the thievery made for that great of a song; I mean, I like it, especially in the chorus of "I don't know where the sunbeams end/and where the starlight begins/it's all a mystery," but I can name half a dozen songs from Soft Bulletin that I enjoy more without breaking a sweat.

As I said before, the "nice, but..." issue dominates the rest of the album. I guess that "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1" is a highlight, featuring an interesting effect on the acoustic guitars that serve as the foundation (under all the hip drums and the fun keyboard noises) and a genuine playful warmth in Wayne's vocals (singing absolutely ridiculous lyrics that are nonetheless no more ridiculous than those to various 70s prog rock epics that I love). It's a lot of fun to play in Rock Band 3, too. The second part of the song (is this actually live, or are those audience nosies dubbed in as spectators to the "battle?") is a cute little experiment full of meticulously arranged drum and synth parts, but it fades into background noise for me pretty easily. "In the Morning of the Magicians" has a really beautiful introduction (which pops up again later), but the core of the song is just a pleasant enough ballad; the same goes for "One More Robot - Sympathy 3000-21," coming before "Yoshimi," and which only grabs me during the fairly nice chorus. And so on through the rest of the album: I definitely like "Ego Tripping At the Gates of Hell," "It's Summertime" and the pretty/depressing "All We Have is Now," and the closing instrumental "Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)" makes for some colorful atmospherics, but none of them make me want to rant and rave about them.

So honestly, all the love for the album by pretty much everybody (there are lots of people who like this more than Soft Bulletin, for instance) kinda confuses me a little bit. I mean, I really like the album, but if I had to draw a comparison in terms of my response to the album, I'd have to mention Axis: Bold as Love, another fan favorite full of subtle touches that I've never seemed to get as much as I'm "supposed" to. I mean, it's rather nice, and any post-90s rock music collection without "Do You Realize?" is found wanting, but the band's done better.

The three "political" songs here that seemingly everybody focuses on here, of course, are "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song," "Free Radicals" and "The W.A.N.D.," and I feel like people spent way too much time looking for subtext in these that wasn't there. It's like everybody wanted "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" to be about President Bush, basing their reactions to the song almost solely how they felt about him, when it's clearly a goofy musing (no different in tone than the types of musings that Coyne had done about outer space and sunbeams and starlight) about power corrupting people. I can see where somebody might find the vocal sampling in the song incredibly obnoxious (I admit it took me a couple of listens to get used to it), and the song isn't a career highlight, but it's a fun, hyperactive pop song that I enjoy singing along to, so I'm glad it's here. "Free Radicals" (which people wanted to build up into some sort of critique of people as political fanatics, I guess) is a bizarre attempt at something Prince-like, featuring somebody (I'm guessing Steve, not Wayne, though I don't know for sure) singing in falsetto over one of the clumsiest attempts at a funk groove I can imagine; I don't quite hate it, but it definitely gives a bad impression for the rest of the album. And "The W.A.N.D." is just a fun guitar hook with a goofy effects-laden song built around it, or so people would think if they weren't so fixated on the "We got the power now!" line. I just don't get why people would suddenly have this idea that this band, of all bands, would suddenly develop a topical political conscience, and I feel like these things are just a distraction from the real identity of the album.

The other track that people fixated too much on is the "single" portion of "It Overtakes Me." The main riff and vocal melody makes it seem like one of the dumbest pop songs the band had ever done, even if the processed "You know that it is unreal" vocal line makes it clear that there's a bit more going on here than one might find in a typical No Doubt single. People then often tend to dismiss the whole track as a failed single, which is funny to me, because this ignores the entire second half of the song. You know, that whole section where the track turns into breathtakingly gorgeous directionless atmosphere, full of snippets of Yes-ish pedal steel (or something sounding like it) popping up amongst great synths and vocal parts that nearly beat Jon Anderson at his whole game? Or how it suddenly turns on a dime from there into acoustic lines that do nothing if not evoke early Genesis? Do I just have a hacked copy of the album that's different from everybody else's? What is going on here?

See, here's the thing: once you get past the songs mentioned, as well as a couple of pleasant-ish keyboard-driven ballads ("Mr. Ambulance Driver," the closing "Going On"), the big stories of this album are (a) the band's willingness to go further than ever in embracing the studio and all available production techniques and (b) the band's total embracing of classic prog rock. Longtime fans of the band probably wouldn't be thrilled with either of these; one could make the argument that this album largely severed the band's ties to its "traditional" past of ultimately being based in a "real" band unit working together, and the fact that the band has jumped so thoroughly on the prog rock bandwagon here (the last two albums, artsy fartsy as they were in a lot of ways, were still mostly slightly dressed up pop music) probably wouldn't thrill most people either. Personally, I find these developments fantastic; regarding (b), I'm not necessarily inclined to prefer prog rock over other kinds of music, but the band shows it really understands the guts of what made this music style so enjoyable way back when, and they assimilate themselves into this world surprisingly well. Regarding (a), the band makes use of tons of vocal and instrumental effects on this album, and while some may think these get tedious after a while, I'm too busy enjoying all of the cool sounds the band is grafting into its (still first-rate) melodies.

Of the remaining six songs, two can't quite be lumped into the prog rock category, but they're great nonetheless. "Haven't Got a Clue" seemed like a silly novelty song the first time I heard it (agreeing with my pre-conceived notion of how the album would sound), and maybe it is, but it's a fantastic silly novelty song. The synthetic beat under the acoustic guitar is as addictive as similar tricks were on Yoshimi, there are gobs of great synth effects, and the lyrics, well, you'd be surprised how much fun it can be to sing "And everytime you state your case, the more I want to punch your face," followed by those vocal noises and matching guitar sounds. If you've heard the song, you know what I'm describing, and if you haven't, you need to hear it now.

The other one that's not quite prog rock, but maybe is kinda sorta, is "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion," which features Wayne in full-blown Brian Wilson mode (as pretty much everybody who mentions the song feels obligated to mention). Maybe the lyrics mine slightly familiar territory ("Yes it's true someday everything dies"), but I have to admit that I'm a sucker for lines like, "They only see the obvious/They see the sun go down but they don't see it rise." And man, those keys, and that simple guitar part in the break, and that ATMOSPHERE. Slight shame about the production, though (more later).

The other four aren't anything but prog rock. "The Sound of Failure" feels to me like it belongs in Wind and Wuthering-era Genesis, and while I find what actually made it onto much of that album disappointing, it also fostered a vibe that made for a handful of absolutely fantastic ballads ("Blood on the Rooftops" and to a lesser extent "Your Own Special Way," as well as the amazing outtake "Inside and Out"). Am I really the only person who can imagine (with great happiness) the late-70s Collins giving a great vocal workout, Rutherford laying the foundation on acoustic and bass, Hackett doing all sorts of great guitar texture things, and Banks sitting back and giving some quality atmosphere? Ah well, fun fantasy it may be, this song is really great as is, featuring a great contrast between the laid-back verses and the up-beat "Don't tell Britney and don't tell Gwen ..." section, and I really dig the atmospheric instrumental section at the end. A couple of tracks later, after "Cosmic Autumn Rebellion," comes an absolutely top-notch atmospheric keyboard/-acoustic-guitar-driven ballad in "Vein of Stars," and if somebody can't find joy in that upwards spacey guitar line in the breaks or the amazing mellotron (or its digital doppelganger, whatever), then I just don't understand them. The instrumental, "The Wizard Turns On," is a little less impressive than what came before, as it emphasizes the ugly squealing guitar line more than I'd like (More Mellotron Flute! More Ominous Keyboards!), but it's still pretty nice.

The big massive highlight, though, is clearly "Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung" (literally either "The Collapse of Pompeii" or "The Downfall of Pompeii"), a prog-rock masterpiece (clearly drawing from Yes and Pink Floyd though showing no direct plagiarism) that tries to depict the freezing in time of a young couple by the fires of Vesuvius. Keywords: Mellotron flute; great bassline; amazing tear-jerking guitar solo; sparse, atmospheric-as-hell vocals and lyrics. It's some of the best prog rock I can imagine coming from a band that isn't quite exactly prog rock.

If there's a general downside to the album beyond what I've said thus far, it's that the band probably recorded things a little too loudly; there's some clear clipping in the sound, even in great tracks, and I kinda hope for a remix some day that cleans up some places that need cleaning up. "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion" and "Pompeii," in particular, have some muddiness and crackle that get a little distracting (though I kinda feel like it's appropriate in the second half of "Pompeii," though: there's lava covering everything, after all). This is only a minor inconvenience, though; it's not crippling in the same way as the loudness on, say, Vapor Trails was.

Overall, then, while I can't really say for sure this album is exactly underrated (it's gotten lots of bad reviews, but lots of good ones too), it sure feels pretty misunderstood to me. Personally, I think it's clearly better than Yoshimi; it may not be as consistent, but there are more and higher peaks (yes, I think "Sound of Failure" and "Pompeii" are definitely better than "Do You Realize?"), and I feel less like I'm searching for things to love here than there. If you don't own it, I can't guarantee you'll really like it (it is, after all, extremely easy to dismiss this whole album as "annoying" if you want to), but you have to give this a shot.

Beyond that, I'd say there are a few bits and pieces that stand out, like the off-kilter harmonies of "In Excelsior Vaginalistic," the majestic synth horns of "The Gleaming Armament of Marching Genitalia" and "Space Bible with Volume Lumps," and the triumphant end of the closing title track reprise. Other than that, though, there's an awful lot of spacey, well, space to lose yourself in, and the album seems weirdly draggy for one that only lasts half an hour. What's odd to me is that I tend to regard ambient music more favorably than a lot of people do, and I thought I'd end up being able to pull a few interesting insights out of thin air, but this album mostly leaves me stumped. It isn't bad, but it's only for hardcore fans.

There was a predictable course for the band after Mystics had a mixed reception, and they didn't follow it. Before getting the album, I assumed that the title "Embryonic" would symbolically define a return to roots for the band, and that the album would probably be like their version of R.E.M.'s Accelerate (which is very good and enjoyable but still clearly an inferior imitation of the classic era). I eventually heard that people were talking about this album as a bit of a mindblowing trip, completely different from anything the band had done before, but I figured they had to be exaggerating and were probably just suffering from a lack of perspective. I also knew that the album was getting some pretty rave reviews, but they tended to be from sources that tend to praise all sorts of things that I have no interest in; I mean, if the album was getting lauded by Pitchfork, how good could it really be? I didn't even bother to buy this album until early 2011, a handful of months before I started these reviews; I figured it was probably just an afterthought to the band's career, something for me to try to chew on after I hashed out my reasons for preferring Transmissions to Clouds.

Listening to this album for the first time was quite possibly the most pleasant shock of my life. I liked almost everything about it the first time; maybe the two pure-noise free-jazz jams ("Aquarius Sabotage," "Scorpio Sword") were a bit much (I still wouldn't seek them out to listen to them individually), but they worked perfectly in context (the majestic upward string parts in the latter are a great energetic boost, for instance), and everything else was just flabbergasting. That first listen was exhausting and exhilerating all at once; I couldn't believe, as an example, how effective it was to follow up "Silver Trembling Hands" (the antepenultimate track) with a track basically consisting of the repeated keyboard chords underpinning "Hands" with semi-directionless vocal harmonies and a sampled radio voice saying, "This is the beginning" over and over again. By the time it was all done and the last pounding beats and noises of "Watching the Planets" were gone, I had to ask myself something: "Did ... ... did I just listen to one of my favorite albums for the first time?"

In subsequent listens, I approached the album and my initial instinct with skepticism: I had to have overreacted, and I could not have really thought this was so great. The album had to be a bunch of noisy, atmospheric smoke and mirrors, made to seem like something greater than it really was. And ok, I did find some kinks in the armor: aside from the aforementioned jams, "Your Bats" (a little throwaway-ish and clumsy by the album's standards) and "If" (same, even if this is on the pretty side while "Your Bats" is on the goofy jam side), there's a sense with a lot of the tracks that they don't really have clearly defined beginnings and ends (and didn't I complain about how the songs on Telepathic Surgery didn't feel finished?), and that could be seen as more than a bit of a betrayal by a band that, first and foremost, had created great "basic" song structures through the years. For this reason especially, I could see somebody actually disliking the album immensely, and I can't just ignore that completely.

I can sure ignore it mostly, though, because the album has plenty of strengths to compensate. The one that startles me the most is the sudden emergence of the bass guitar as a crucial part of the band's sound. I initially assumed (and why wouldn't I?) that Michael was responsible for all of the great bass work here, but I've been told that most of the lines on this album actually come from Wayne. Whoever is playing these lines, anyway, is an absolute BEAST on this album, knocking out one overpowering bass part after, and I'd really have to sit and think to come up with 10 albums I enjoy more solely from a bass playing perspective. "Convinced of the Hex," "The Sparrow Looks Up at the Machine," "See the Leaves," "Gemini Syringes," "Powerless," "The Ego's Last Stand," "Saggitarius Silver Announcement," "Worm Mountain," "Silver Trembling Hands" and "Watching the Planets" all feature simple yet effective lines that are at the core of their respective songs, and I'll be damned if I could think of 10 songs from other Flaming Lips albums total where the bass parts stood out to me in any significant way. So hooray for Michael/Wayne/whomever!

Another thing I have to praise to the hilt is the atmospheric aspects: they'd pulled off tracks with great atmospheres before, but never had they pulled off great tracks that relied on almost nothing but their atmospheric aspects. Take "Evil," for instance: it's basically just an upwards synth line over and over, with Wayne delicately singing "I wish I could go back, go back in time," and it would almost seem silly and like a throwaway if not for (a) the beauty of the backing vocals (especially in the "Go back in time" parts), (b) the vocal climax of "I would have warned you those people are evil" and (c) all of those BEAUTIFUL keyboard underpinnings, especially in the second half. Or take "Gemini Syringes," which is basically a nagging bassline with sampled voices (from, uh, what seems to be a mathematician), sparse keyboard tinklings and repeated vocals singing "Gemini Psalms" over and over, building into a single glorious high-pitched synth sound and then working down from it. Or take the aforementioned "Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast," which still floors me every time.

With all of these positives, though, there still seem to be some people whining about the "lack of real songs with memorable melodies" and the "lack of real emotional content." I find both of these complaints fascinating, to say the least. "The Sparrow Looks Up at the Machine," for instance, might not satisfy people listening with indie rock ears, but when I've got my prog rock ears on, I have to say that "What/What does it mean/To dream what you dream/To believe what you've seen?" sung in that way, with those chords underpinning, with that bassline and that drum part going on, is about as memorable as anything I can imagine. "See the Leaves" (up until it turns into something like the better keyboard-driven moments from More or Ummagumma) is pure memorable hard rock goodness, twisted up into something great. The closing "Watching the Planets," similarly, is every bit the great catchy, pounding rocker that, say, "Slow Nerve Action" was (and that's not just because this its own irresistable pounding beat, this time courtesy of Kliph Scurlock, the long-time tour drummer who finally gets a full studio credit); it just has dark epic spacey-ness in addition to the "basic" elements of the song. If you can listen to this album and not at least feel drawn in by "Watching the Planets," then I don't know what to say.

The emotional content, then, is every bit as much here as in previous albums; it just manifests in bizarre, painful ways not shown in previous albums. "Powerless," for instance, has its nagging bassline going the whole time, and starts off as a decent dark paranoid piece of sadness, but it's when the long, raw, Neil Young-ish (think "Cowgirl in the Sand") guitar solo comes in that the song becomes pure pain. Another track seeped in emotion, not yet mentioned, is "I Can be a Frog," which is basically a silly dreamy song with a guest star (Karen-O of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs) literally phoning in silly noises as Wayne sings lines like, "She said I can be a frog/I can be a bat/I can be a bear/Or I can be a cat ..." and so on. It's just a goofy throwaway ... or is it? Maybe I'm wrong, but it sure seems to me like the girl isn't with the guy in the present tense; I hear this is as a song of sad, longing nostalgia for memories of a girl long gone, whether through death or mistakes of the past.

And don't forget "The Impulse," a synth ballad where Wayne makes his vocals completely indecipherable as he sings through a vocoder. This "happy robot from space" synth-torch-ballad might not pack as much of a wallop if placed earlier in the album, but placed here, after the noisy Sabbath-like rocking (done in a way consistent with the rest of the album, of course) of "Worm Mountain" and the craziness of "Scorpio Sword," and before the desperate energy of "Silver Trembling Hands," it makes for an amazing oasis.

There's a LOT more that could be said about this album, but this review is running long so I'll wind it down and leave a few more thoughts. The first: for an album that lasts 70 minutes, has so much going on and is so exhausting, I sure find myself sad that it's over and wanting more when it's done. The second: for all of my love of this album, I'm still inclined to keep the "best album" title for the band with Transmissions, since I do really love the way they approached pop rock on that album. Plus, there's still some small sense of disbelief in me that I could really rate an album made this late in the band's career so highly. Just consider yourself forewarned: I could very easily switch things up some day and award this album the top mark for the band. If for some reason you gave up on the band years ago, or if you're a hardcore art rock buff who never really bothered with the band, you have to give this a shot. You might hate it, but if not ...

My overall impression of the album is that it's enjoyable but not really necessary. This doesn't mean that it's overly faithful to the original album, because it isn't; it follows the exact same ebb and flow, with even the sound effects put in the exact right spots, but the mechanism of presentation is definitely different. No, what I mean is that, for all of the changes made, none of them improve upon the original, and at best produce kind of a "huh, I guess that's neat" variation on them. Henry Rollins makes all of the original interview samples clear as a bell, whereas before I didn't know what exactly what was being said, but to be honest I kinda liked the slight air of mystery surrounding the original samples. In terms of the treatment of the other effects, a treatment typical of the album is the transformation of the chiming clocks from the original into blaring fire alarms; interesting, but definitely not an upgrade.

In terms of the music, there are definitely no smooth jazz leanings on the album, which unfortunately saps it of some of the power of the original. "Breathe" gets turned into a bass-heavy disorienting rocker (the same holds for the reprise at the end of "Time"), "Time" has a disconcertingly timid vocal, "Money" features watery distortion in the voices and some weird effects on the guitar and bass, and similar changes are elsewhere. The melodies and lyrics still hold up just fine in the new context, though (even if melody was certainly not the main focus in the original), so at least I can still focus on them when listening.

This is pretty far from an essential album for the band, but given that it was clearly not conceived as one this shouldn't be surprising. Still, it's worth a listen once or twice if you're a fan of the band. If you've never listened to The Flaming Lips and you're just interested in the fact that somebody released a full-album cover of The Dark Side of the Moon in 2009, though, there's a non-trivial chance you might hate this.

For me, this is a noticable step down from Embryonic, even if I still enjoy the album a great deal. This album preserves a great deal of the newly-found mastery of atmospherics that appeared on that album, but there are a lot of other nice aspects from that album that I find myself missing here. The great basslines that served as the backbone for so many songs on that album aren't found here; there's bass, of course, but the bass is no longer a critical asset. There are no guitar parts as naked and as devestating as the one in "Powerless," no relatively lightweight (if melancholy) tracks like "I Can Be a Frog" or "The Impulse" to help with the flow, no interesting inclusions of audio samples, and no moments of sheer POWER like in "The Sparrow Looks Up at the Machine" or "Watching the Planets." It may not be fair to judge this album relative to Embryonic, but when I see people trying to make the case that this album is better than that one, I feel like these are nit-picks that need to be made. Embryonic is in an all-time great tier (a controversial statement but one I feel the need to keep making) and this one simply does not have the material, at a micro level or a macro level, to allow for this possibility.

It sure has the material to make it a really good, almost great album, though. This album is all about depressing atmosphere (in the music and the lyrics), incredible production, great percussion and good melodies. Guitar is used sparsely and primarily to provide extra atmospheric color, but we should be used to that by now, even if this approach to the instrument is more exaggerated than on previous albums. My main impression listening to the album the first time was basically, "Yup, they're Can now," and while that's obviously an oversimplification, the influence of Can on this album is tremendous in terms of the use of rigid percussion parts and disorienting keyboard parts to create a crushing atmosphere. I don't really mind this, of course, and the band certainly takes this influence and provides its own unique spin, but there's a familiarity to this approach that helps muffle the shock-and-awe effect that might otherwise be felt in the final product.

The two biggest highlights of the album are also the two longest tracks. "You Lust" is the album's centerpiece in every way, a 13-minute drone built around the combination of a rising synth and a percussion loop that oozes epic power with every iteration. Coyne's duet with Sarah Barthel (of a duo called Phantogram) is both depressing and memorable, the periodic whispered "Lust to succeed" evokes Damo Suzuki in every way, and the different textures coming in and out of the mix help give enough variety to the sound to keep it from feeling like it's worn out its welcome by the time it shifts into a weirdly calming set of melodies that almost sounds like a post-modern lullaby (All-music says it sounds like a recording from the 60s called Soothing Sounds for Baby, which I've never heard, but my initial instinct was that it sounds like an adaptation of this album for the Rockabye Baby collection). The other main highlight comes from "Butterfly, How Long it Takes to Die," where skittish guitars, hallucinogenic keyboards, a vocal melody that squeezes out gobs of atmosphere from its two lines (repeated from time to time in the song) and a short but terrifying set of lyrics make for one hell of a bleak contemplation of the universe. We've come a long way from the "gee golly the universe is neat" vibe of "Where does outer space end?" and "I don't know where the sunbeams end and the starlight begins" to the "oh gawd the universe is grand but everything dies and is pointless" vibe here, that's for sure.

There's a lot of other good material on the album; of the remaining seven tracks, I'd have to say that only "You Are Alone" really drags down the album, making the album feel more boring than it actually is. Otherwise, good ideas abound. The opening "Look, The Sun is Rising" sets the tone perfectly, with bits of angry guitar noise cutting into a powerful percussion groove overlaid with a simple synth riff while Wayne sings an atmospheric melody that's way more developed than it seems on first listen. "Be Free, a Way" and "Try to Explain" each produce plenty of beauty within the uncomfortable framework of the album (the jittery percussion noises in the former and the touches of guitar distortion across the latter definitely add an edge to songs that could have been clearly pretty in another context, as opposed to ambiguously pretty here), and while they didn't stand out on first listen they did by the third or so.

"The Terror" is only vaguely memorable in the vocal melody (which I think is sung by Drozd though I'm not sure), but this is made up for plenty in all of the effects used, whether in distorting the vocals or in the keyboard parts starting in the third minute or in the bits of noisy guitar rarely popping up in the background. "Turning Violent" is a track where Drozd (at least, I assume that's Drozd) sounds absolutely naked and vulnerable in the vocals, and the combination of the falsetto, the lower vocal and those distorted sounds in the second half is unsettling. And finally, while it doesn't entirely live up to its first terrifying 20 seconds, "Always There, in Our Hearts" is a great closer, feeling at times like the very musical embodiment of some powerful force destroying hope from within. I feel like the stern voice in the background counting out beats is one idea too many for the song and it would have been better without it, but that's just a minor nitpick.

I waver back and forth on what grade to give this, and while I ultimately settled on a grade of B based on my gut (for instance, I'm not convinced that I like this more than Mystics enough to give it a higher grade, if at all), there will be plenty of days where I'll want to regard this higher. For somebody like me, who considers this era of the band a marvelous thing, this is yet another essential album.

With this album, it's hard for me to come away with any conclusion except that, at this point, the band was fundamentally broken. This is the first major (aside from the various side projects) Flaming Lips album I can think of since their maturity (Priest Driven Ambulance as my arbitrary starting point for this) that seems more interested in the idea of what the band is supposed to sound like (from Soft Bulletin onward) than in actually making something that adds something significant to their legacy. The two main focuses of their artistic navel-gazing here are Yoshimi and The Terror, and while I admire the ambition to try and connect two vastly different albums (while simultaneously trying to graft in any new production techniques that strike their collective fancy), the end result ends up sounding much more confused than inspired. A great deal of this album sounds to me like sketches or in-progress versions of tracks that would eventually make it to an album, as opposed to final versions, and frankly I'm not sure Coyne, Drozd or anybody else involved with this album had the ability to know the difference. I'm hardly somebody who demands that the band adhere to a strict framework regarding what constitutes a "song," but I do demand that the band show a clear sense of knowing what it's doing (and the band had been very successful at doing this for a very long time), and that sense is largely gone here.

This is all the more frustrating because, in the midst of all of the confusion that this album provides, I can hear gobs of interesting ideas in melody, harmony, and arrangements, showing themselves in brief tantalizing glimpses and then going away too soon. There are some tracks, fortunately, where these ideas combine into something that can actually sustain an entire track, and those tracks are highlights. The opening title track is a beautiful combination of minimalist melody and atmospheric synthesizers over a programmed percussion part, and the glimpses of that melody that appear in later tracks are highlights there as well. Much later is another highlight in "One Night While Hunting For Faeries And Witches And Wizards To Kill," where nagging minimalist percussion over bass (synthesized or otherwise it's rather striking) later joins with various amusing production effects to produce something that makes Wayne's lyrical nonsense seem profound and epic (this is a compliment). I'm also quite a fan of "The Castle," a nice ballad (VERY much in the Yoshimi style) built around a gentle echoey guitar line, and the closing "We a Famly," Miley Cyrus appearance (and some less than ideal production in spots) notwithstanding, is another lovely ballad, this time built around guitar and keyboard parts that occasionally have vaguely Eastern aspects, with Wayne bringing out his patented "gee whiz the universe is tough but I'm glad we're in this together" vibe and mixing it with imagery of Jesus in a spaceship.

The rest of the tracks mix fascinating and frustrating together with great aplomb. "How??" is probably the best exercise in combining the Yoshimi and Terror approaches into a single song, but the interesting core is undercut by not knowing how to build it into an interesting track with a discernable start or finish, and this forms a pattern for the rest of the album. "There Should be Unicorns" has an interesting combination of production effects and an interesting atmospheric vocal melody, but the lyrics are pretty stupid, and when they're largely repeated in a pitched-down monologue near the end, the effect is embarassing. "Sunrise (Eyes of the Young)" initially sounds like a Clouds-era vocal melody transplanted into Yoshimi arrangements in the beginning, but there's also a repeated attempt to graft it onto something that sounds like it belongs straight from The Terror, and the two approaches make almost no sense with each other. And so on through the bulk of the album. Over and over, good ideas emerge and work well enough to keep from going "this track sucks!" but then something else about the track manages to keep me from going "this track rules!" and after a while I just get frustrated.

I have a bad track record at predicting when a given band will hang it up, so I don't want to assume as of writing (in 2017) that this will be the band's last album, but I will say that, as things stand at this time, I'm not sure where the band can go from here. All of the gimmicks and other stuff that kept clouding the band's reputation was forgivable as long as they continued to churn out interesting material, but if they're going to put out albums like this, where it doesn't seem like they bothered to finish what they started, then the point is going to come where they become self-parodic clowns. This album doesn't quite bring them all the way to that point, but it's closer than I would like. It's to the band's credit that, for all of the ill-will that much of this album produces in me on a general level, I still like enough bits of it to give it a grade that's not at all bad, but I can also see a situation where the band could completely fall off a cliff on subsequent albums.