By Talbs, WTSC GM

The punk-rock born, experimentally-evolved band The Flaming Lips have created a new pinnacle in their psychedelic rock endeavors this week with the release of their twelfth studio album Embryonic. With a strong cult following after albums such as The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the hard-core followers (not me, by the way) felt the band was on a course for pop-alternative sounds and a routine stage performance with their 2006 release of At War with the Mystics. However, those assumptions have been turned upside down with the most experimental release by the "fearless freaks" since their four-disk Zaireeka album which was meant to be played on four stereos simultaneously.

Unlike At War with the Mystics which featured fairly processed and mastered tracks such as "The W.A.N.D." which were featured in Dell commercials and movies, Embryonic is incredibly raw sounding. Unless you have a trained ear or are able to listen to the album without any distractions, it's almost too raw sounding in fact. The album begins with "Convinced of the Hex" and "The Sparrow Looks up at the Machine" - two great tracks which exemplify the band's ability to produce a song surrounding you as if they were packed into your dorm room. The sound is genuine, live-like, and complex. The lyrics, in Flaming Lips fashion, question life, madness, time, and other deep subjects leaving the listener with similar confusion and contradictions as they did in the track "Do You Realize??", now the Official Rock Song of Oklahoma. The 18-track album continues in a similar fashion with some more mellow, hallucinagenic tracks such as "Evil", "If", and "Gemini Syringes" mixed in with dense, higher-tempo songs such as "Aquarius Sabotage" and "See The Leaves".

Another great addition to this album is the guest appearances by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and MGMT. Karen O throws in some animal-sound vocal work into the freakishly-chilling-yet-kindergarden-inspired "I Can Be A Frog". She also adds come color to the fantastic ending-track which is a personal favorite of mine, "Watching the Planets". MGMT adds some overly-fuzzed guitar to the track "Worm Mountain" which is upbeat and drowning in both the guitar and drums.

Lastly I would like to leave you with these thoughts - this albums is not for the faint of heart. If you listen to it thinking you are going to study over it or get something done, forget about it. It is as intellectually challenging as music could possibly be. However, it is absolutely beautiful to listen to if you have the focus. To give you an idea, I had to listen to the 70-minute double LP about 8 times in the past 2 days before feeling confident enough to write this review. From this I have found, the more you listen, the more rewarding Embryonic gets.

The Flaming Lips Embryonic is now in rotation at WTSC 91.1fm. Call in to request a track or visit our website at radio.clarkson.edu.