The Flaming Lips – Embryonic

I agree with coffeeboss! Surely the furriest, probably the most intriguing packaging in my collection. And what an album!

Unreal sounding pressing. Just snagged a used copy at Grimeys in Nashville for $15 and it sounds NM to me.

Still one of our most interesting CD cases and after all these years it hasn’t receded or gone grey!

I am thinking the sound on this one is really, really good. Thankful to have this one in my collection..

Agreed. History will be *very* kind to Embryonic. Pound for pound, it's a great record. I love this album over anything they've ever done, including The Soft Bulletin which is great from soup to nuts. Get while the getting is still good.

History will be kind to Embryonic. An overly lenient editing process let through a few tracks with craftsmanship a bit below the standard of the previous three records, resulting in a protracted nebulous marathon journey, but Embryonic sees the group demonstrating unusually prescient self-awareness of the aesthetic corner they had written their career into. There is an immediate reduction in saccharine synth-driven ballads (A3 & B2 notwithstanding), and a marked uptick in aggression and minor-scale tension. Even the recording process introduces a refreshing edge with massively clipped/grainy channels on almost every song.

Big driving grainy bass, clipped fuzzy drum fills, and psychedelic harp swells anchored by modest guitar and measured wurlitzer/rhodes: this is a gorgeous big-budget 'lo-fi' soundscape, and one that I'm sure Warner Brothers was terribly disappointed with. In the major's defense, the Flaming Lips were immediately rewarded for turning in their most subtle, urgent, brave, and least kitschy full-length album in a decade with a significant drop-off in sales.

For better or for worse, Embryonic plays like a director's cut. Trimming 15 minutes worth of material and getting the final piece under 60 minutes would have eliminated the weakest plodding tracks and aided in assembling a more coherent emotional journey, which surely would have resulted in better engagement and sales. If the lack of editing was due to the band considering this still as a 'concept' record like the previous two with enough narrative coherence to not abide removing the weakest 15 minutes, then the group greatly overestimated the importance of this one's narrative. If they had bad experiences editing the previous records with Warner and just badgered the label into giving up and publishing whatever they wanted on this one, I can live with that.

As it stands, for those willing to make the journey, not only does Embryonic contain two of the absolute best tracks put to tape in a 5-decade spanning recording career in 'Your Bats' and 'Silver Trembling Hands', but it marks an unusual late-career aesthetic improvement. It is always noteworthy when established recording artists reverse a broadly observable artistic decline. Embryonic is not a new peak, but it represents spectacular resilience and drive to combat the decline of commercial complacency and age. For historians tracing relevant cultural patterns with the record's artistic language, its not hard to connect the dots on a theme that sees the group pointing out a society accelerating into Carl Sagan's warning:

"Clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what’s true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.”

Mastering wise this sounds great, but I myself got a bit of a noisy copy which is noticeable on the more quiet tracks (surprising considering this was pressed at Pallas). Seems like this is OOP at the moment.

I found this lp really difficult to listen to: compressed to the max and a very rough and raw sound with swathes of grating distortion, grit and grime, some of which is the noisy pressing.

debilitating surface noise all over side 2, such a shame because otherwise its a great package, and the vinyl master sounds really good when there isn't any surface noise.
Edit: I was just listening to the album digitally and the surface noise is actually part of the mix, now I feel like an idiot.

This is one of the nicest packages I've come across. Very sturdy sleeve. Vinyl sounds incredible. This album's production is NASTY.