The Factual Opinion

The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 13

 A Place To Bury Strangers
Exploding Head

While using Exploding Head as an album title may bring about memories of Scanners, the better Cronenberg comparison is Videodrome--specifically, the part where James Woods shoves his hand inside his stomach vagina. It's not that Head is wet & warm, it's that it's resolutely fucking internal, the kind of music that's best heard inside a cave. Even when it opens up for the title track's 80's dance party, it dives back underneath a bed of dissonance one track later, obsessing over the same bass lick until the drums and guitars--programmed and processed into a screeching roar--fight back and forth over who gets to lay claim to making the most unattractive form of noise. It's the most anti-dance that it can be, and yet it's clearly designed for rocking out. Hail and farewell, No Fun Festivals--we can make out at dawn, we'll use our blood ears as lubricant.

It's not just noise, despite how everything on this album--the guitars, the drums, the vocals--sounds like it was recorded on a tape player sitting next to a busted speaker. That sense of cheapness is part of Exploding Head's charm, in fact, it's part of the band's shtick. When their first album dropped, the reference claims were abundant--it's Jesus & Mary Chain, it's Joy Division, it's this, it's that--and it was hard to argue with them. Exploding Head doesn't refute those claims--for lack of a better, less stupid phrase, it blows them up. Banging on and on, marathoning the bass, the pedals, the effects, the fuzz, this was it: 2009 in aggressive make out sessions. They're making something old new again--but they're going to keep ahold of the dated parts as long as possible. People who hang solo, you're making a mistake. Doing it is the shit.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

Comics Of The Weak: Pardon Me Waiter, But I Specifically Asked For The Non Raping Super-Hero Comics

Incorruptible # 1
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Jean Diaz & Belardino Brabo
Published by Boom Comics

This is the latest comic to spin out of t-shirt and internet meme related superstar Mark Waid's you-get-what-you-pay-for super-hero comic line. Only time will tell if it will follow Irredeemable's catchy "look, more complaining about snark" tradition, or if it's got another Old People Angered By Progress trick up its sleeve. Maybe this could be the one that'll piss and moan about how much it stinks that people don't need a license to make babies, or maybe it'll just have a bunch of characters that constantly refer to television news as "infotainment". It's too soon to tell, but it's also too late, because: yikes, Incorruptible. This is some rotten eggs.

Azrael # 3
Written by Fabian Nicieza
Art by Ramon Backs, John Stanisci & JD Smith
Published by DC Comics

Publishing a super-hero story where the super-hero only wears his costume for the first few pages and the art looks like it's been inspired by an underground comix imitation of Beck's Captain Marvel may not make a lot of sense to people who read comic books, but that's because they're not paying attention to a pretty astute business decision, one that was made months ago. See, at some point during the summer, DC realized that there was going to be a new Joe Sacco comic (something about one of those middle east countries) and they knew that a whole new crop of potential fans would be wandering the aisles, looking for the one graphic novel they already own (Palestine) to have a sibling. And if DC could just come up with something that could capture those people's attentions--which is, again, shit involving those middle east countries--there was a decent possiblility that they could hook 'em. After giving the job to one of their "i'll do whatever, sure" writers and a Robin penciler, they ended up with Azrael, a comic book series with an upcoming story arc involving the Israel/Palestine conflict as it relates to Gotham City and Harvey Bullock. It's a good plan!

Dark Avengers # 12
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Mike Deodato
Published by Marvel Comics

When dude has molecule controlling powers, that means dude can take the ladies clothes right off, so why dude not want to do that? Shit, she'll stand up on her tippytoes while he's stripping her, all the better for the jack a crack a lacking. Women are HOT. Naked women are HOTTER. Naked women wearing glasses getting stripped of their clothes except for their glasses and undies by supervillains are HOTTEST.

Wait, if a supervillain is capable of re-arranging molecules on a completely whatever level is so into the ladies that he strips the nearest one talking to him of her clothes for no reason beyond a peekaboo, why isn't that guy holed up in a hotel room, banging on hot chicks that he molecularly created? Was that going to happen next?

Dark Wolverine # 81
Written by Daniel Way & Marjorie Liu
Art by Giuseppe Camuncoli, Onofrio Catacchio & Marte Gracia
Published by Marvel Comics

The last time Camuncoli drew Dark Wolverine, the character jumped around like an acrobat, got laid inside a mirror, and wore a wallet chain in his downtime. In this excursion, he rocks a scarf on top of a vest & t-shirt number, reminisces about slaughtering an old Japanese woman over tea, and there's an Armistead Maupin-style look into the life of a professional wrestler type cold cocking his cross-wearing wife while the children shoelessly weep in the room next door. And because it's Camuncoli, it looks hellacious. There's a bunch of really nicely laid out pages and panels, the whole thing reads and breathes like some kind of oddball poetry. It's a good looking comic about good looking people, hell, even the wife-beating muscleman ends up being physically attractive. (The old Japanese lady looks great too, at least until Daken rips her jaw off her fucking  skull.) At the same time, the whole comic is about how some chick flies past a wife-beater on her way to have tea with a guy who wears a scarf over a t-shirt, and...well. Nice art doesn't really change that.

Batman 80 Page Giant # 1
Was Written
Has Art
Published by DC Comics

Ah, it's the 80 Page Giant, brought to you by some dude from the Underworld movies, a Robot Chicken writer, and some people who think that this is good art.

Not content to stop at the clearly meager barricade, this piece of shit shoots for the moon: yes, Kentucky, Alfred has spent the last six months picking up a street whore and reenacting the scene from Pretty Woman where the fancy clothes store retail clerk gets her comeuppance.

Oh Hector Elizondo, we have never missed you this much, no we have not. 

Everybody loses when something like his comes out, but nobody loses as much as you, Jesus Christ. You took those nails for these pricks too.

Batman Streets of Gotham # 7
Written by Paul Dini
Art by Dustin Nguyen
Published by DC Comics

Jeeves: While I don't particularly mind that this storyline uses a child-slaughtering cage match as one of its central plot wheels, I do wonder if the continued success of these child-slaughtering cage matches--as evidenced by the massive body count depicted in this particular issue--doesn't carry with it the implication that Batman is an unusually pathetic excuse for a crime-fighter, to say nothing of the Gotham police. Shouldn't the fact that so many of Gotham's children have gone missing be something that Batman--or any one of the numerous vigilantes in Gotham--discovered themselves? As told in this issue, the only individual who seems to have noticed is the Humpty Dumpty character, and I would suspect he lacks the detective skills Batman is oft-seen using.

Wooster: FUCK U BAD SHIT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME IN THE REAL WOLRD WHAT DO U WANT FOR BATMAN TO JUS FUCKING FIGHT RIDDLER AND JUMP ON TYPEWRITERS THIS SHIT IS INSANE ZSASZ IS CRAZY AS FUCK

Jeeves: Ah! Well, there's some truth in your response, of course. "Bad shit" does happen quite often in the real world, although the idea of an underground cage fight circuit involving small children does seem a bit of a stretch, although I suppose such things might occur in Thailand, don't you

Wooster: ITS FUCKING BATMAN COMICS GOTHAM IS HELL 

Jeeves: It would seem you're trying to have it both ways, sir. If you're demanding a sort of real world "bad shit" to be utilized as a story's consequence, wouldn't you prefer to not have to rely on the excuse that "it's a comic book" when the veracity or internal logic of aforementioned "bad shit" is drawn into question?

Wooster: WHY DONT U GO READ STITCHES AND FUCKING DIE

Jeeves: I've no interest in re-reading Stitches at all! That book was preternaturally depressing, and despite some relatively smart and well drawn pages, I don't feel that it's one that requires any sort of reappraisal to grasp its meaning. Why, everything one could gain from the story was perfectly comprehensible the first time through!

Wooster: FUCKING DIE THEN

Jeeves: Damn you, sir! I've tried my best to curry your favor with a bit of dialog, and you've yet to respond to any of my questions with more than the most blunt and profane by-your-leave! I'll have you know, I see no reason why I sho...wait just one minute, I'm not finished speaking to you!

Wooster: IM DONE LISTENING BITCH AUDI 5000

Green Lantern Corps # 43
Written by Peter J. Tomasi
Art by Patrick Gleason
Published by DC Comics

While it's a win for predictability and cynicism to resurrect a character in the issue immediately following that character's last page death, it's mostly just a weird little journey through the perpetual lack of consequence that dots the Blackest Night collection of titles, oddly making the Justice League tie-in and the Blackest Night Batman mini-series better by comparison. For all of the JLA flaws--and make no mistake, it's constituted completely of flaws--it was a solidly unpredictable comic, one that went so far down the chemical toilet of degradation that one can actually find descriptions of it as Dr. Rape Is Raping Himself Into A Rape-Rape Fever without having to subscribe to the Fuck Superhero Comics & Their Readers newsletters. In the case of Blackest Night Batman, one found a three issue mini-series with a beginning, middle & end, and while it was in the service of a zombie riff on Assault on Precinct 13 that, like most of DC's double-aught output, delivered another climax-in-a-graveyard, BlaxNBats contained a slice of novelty in its toss-some-guns, gut-stab some beat cops extremism. GLC--the ugly, overcast stepsister to DC's Wishing Ring Empire--doesn't even attempt to hide how little it's got to bring to the table, content as it is to present what every non-reader expected it to do, which was to resurrect Kyle Rayner. (He's the one that suicide bombed himself into martyrdom last issue.) Even the title's one piece of new information--the changing of Guy Gardner from a Green Lantern to a Red & Green Lantern--can be easily found on the cover of the issue, making it completely unnessary to actually read the issue. One more, and you can call it a hat trick.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 14

Boxcutter
Arecibo Message

For better or worse, the jump between Burial’s self-titled debut and Untrue, a year and a half later, was an upgrade from sounds to songs. Most of the tracks built around post-RZA soul samples rinsed with enough effects to make them sound shouted from the bottom of an empty well. Naturally, the internet went apeshit. But Untrue also had the massive potential to pigeonhole dubstep at the exact moment of its crossover. Songs like “Archangel” and “Ghost Hardware” possessed enough pop-structure to be, at once, broadly appealing and slightly reductive. Of course, that’s usually how these things go down.

On “Sidetrak,” the opening shot on Boxcutter’s Arecibo Message, the producer from Northern Ireland sublimates Burial’s hip-hop-rooted tricks into a song that eventually explodes into a frenzy of live drumming. At that moment, “Sidetrak” is dubstep, but is not necessarily of dubstep. That virtuosic first track is a fitting beginning to Boxcutter’s third album, which draws from elements of house music, acid jazz, jungle, trance, breakbeat and even pop without ever tipping over into anything other than a pure dubstep album. The burgeoning genre had such a dynamic year in 2009 largely because it proved capable of shouldering enormous expansion—incorporating disparate genres while simultaneously creating a stronger definition of itself. Arecibo Message feels like an attempt to push dubstep (or Boxcutter himself) in a good number of different directions, but never once does Boxcutter lose sight of what he loves about the genre.

Pitchfork’s Jess Harvell off-handedly knocked Arecibo Message for being “a experiment [sic] in bleeding one rave era into another,” but that’s largely what makes it awesome. Boxcutter sees himself as a direct link in the lineage of electronic dance music, and he sees dubstep as its future. The song titles nod toward the styles he draws from—“Free House Acid,” “Lamp Post Funk,” “S p a c e b a s s”—but when accelerated house music pops up in “Mya Rave v2,” it sounds unlike anything from another era.

The actual Arecibo message was an attempt to make contact with extraterrestrial life forms 25,000 years in the future, by beaming a series of binary codes into space. As a theme for a dubstep album, that’s about as genius as it gets, and it bleeds over into the way Boxcutter thinks of himself as a producer, and even the cover art. His first album, Oneric, featured a tree with flowers in bloom on the cover. Arecibo Message features a drawing of futuristic fauna spawned from a spacebound, glowing white orb. There’s no better symbol for Boxcutter’s music being rooted in dubstep’s universe without being tethered by it.

-Martin Brown, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 15

DJ Quik & Kurupt
BlaQKout

DJ Quik and Kurupt have clocked in close to 40 years in the rap industry between them. Both are perennially under-rated artists—with the possible exception of Kurupt showing up 7th on Eminem’s G.O.A.T. list from The Eminem Show’s “Till I Collapse,” one spot ahead of Nas—each with their commercial peaks behind them. DJ Quik spent the 90’s turning in gold and platinum albums for Profile Records, and racking up production credits with 2Pac and Shaquille O’Neal. Kurupt guested on The Chronic before coming up as a member of Tha Dogg Pound. In 2005, both Quik and Kurupt put out albums fully entrenched in their respective mid-90’s mindsets—Quik with the Roger Troutman-fixated, if bangable, Trauma, featuring Nate Dogg and Wyclef; Kurupt with Tha Dogg Pound’s reminder that Daz Dillinger is still alive, Cali Iz Active, featuring production by Swizz Beats and Ryan Leslie, aching for some radio play.  A mere half-decade later, no one—No. One.—expected either of these dudes to make the most forward-thinking mainstream rap album since Stankonia.

To be entirely fair, BlaQKout is not progressive due to its lyrical content. Quik and Kurupt still rhyme like they’re on the Above the Rim soundtrack; no vagina joke goes untold. Still, the two emcees have strong, workmanlike flows that serve to strengthen the production, as Quik goes absolutely binoculars with his beats. Fittingly, Kurupt’s best line on the whole album is, ““This beat is bananas/ It hits your antennas/ Cause DJ Quik’s more gifted than Santa.” There’s a good amount of G-Funk spread around BlaQKout, but it’s a retro-futurist G-Funk. Call and response choruses get tricked out with peals of fuzzy synthesizer. Low end gets replaced with high end. The reference points on songs like “Ohh!” and “Jupiter’s Critic and the Mind of Mars” are more “Doo Doo Chasers” than “Flashlight.” Quik’s beats tend to overtly call attention to themselves, mostly in the chopped up vocal samples he uses. You can practically hear the ProTools breaks, and yet Quik manages an intense amount of diversity out of the approach. On the album’s two standout tracks, “Hey Playa!” and “9x Outta 10,” Quik deconstructs a Moroccan tune lifted from a TV show and an opera passage, respectively. In each song, the snippets swirl into a tornado, anchored only by Quik & Kurupt’s verses.

In many ways, BlaQKout comes off like a side-project rather than the real show, but it’s the rare type of side-project where the players inspire each other to make some of the loosest music of their careers. Mostly, it’s a reminder of how locked in artists can get—to a persona, to a style, to a message—especially in hip-hop, and how fun it can be to witness them color outside the lines. Kurupt told justrhymes.com in an interview in July, “It’s been a long time since we had fun making a record.” Sounds like they needed this one as much as we did.

-Martin Brown, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 16

Japandroids
Post-Nothing

Let’s face it, if Japandroids had released Post-Nothing on Vagrant, it would have had a much quieter landing in 2009. For all the incredible music on their debut album, the best move that Brian King and David Prowse made all year was positioning themselves as an indie rock band, rather than the emo-punks they probably secretly are. What with all the high-pitched bellowing and the mid-90’s punk sensibility, Post-Nothing listens like a guilty pleasure, except that guilty pleasures are rarely as gratifying on repeat. Japandroids may in fact be the Darryl Hall & John Oates of indie rock; they play an immaculately conceived mishmash of cool and uncool sounds. Sophisticated is far from the right word to describe it, but the band has a way of bracing its teen angst with a veteran’s sense of structure and dramatics. Lyrically, for example, the songs on Post-Nothing are incredibly spare. King and Prowse often repeat a single line for the length of a verse or chorus, but those lines are airtight incantations of incredible depth and precision.

Post-Nothing is a quarter-life crisis album, made by two guys in the thick of it. It chases after the past, and dreads the future; or, as King and Prowse put it on “Young Hearts Spark Fire,” “I don’t wanna worry about dying/ I just wanna worry about those sunshine girls.” Japandroids constantly forget how young they are, so they have to keep reminding themselves. It’s no coincidence that Post-Nothing begins with an allusion to “The Boys are Back in Town.” In Thin Lizzy’s deathless jam, the boys arrive back in town to relive their youth by drinking, fighting, playing pool, and tossing money in the jukebox—riding into the sunset on the back of a barstool. On their album-opener, Japandroids’ boys are leaving town without a clue whether or not they’ll make it back. A couple of songs later, they’re hitching a ride to Bikini Island, where there’s a wet-haired sunshine girl around every corner. Shortly after that, they’re pledging to stay crazy forever, as if it’s Britney Spears making a pact with Taryn Manning in Crossroads. Yet, for all of its adolescent attitude, Post-Nothing is a record that has tremendous appeal for those who’ve already weathered their mid-20’s—perhaps because Japandroids’ nostalgia is for a time in their lives that hasn’t even happened yet.

-Martin Brown, 2009

2009: A Crazy Year to be Kanye

What a crazy year to be Kanye! What a crazy year! What a crazy Kanye! This was the year that saw America's first African American President take office. This was also the year that that same President was charged with leading the country out of the worst economic crisis since The Great Depression. What a crazy year to be black in America! What a crazy year to be poor in America! What a crazy year to be Kanye!

While Obama fought to pull the country back from the brink of economic meltdown, Kanye was exploring the theme of celebrity meltdown. While some may believe that Kanye’s erratic behavior is that of a narcissistic megalomaniac teetering on the verge of mental collapse, I think it’s all just showbiz; an Andy Kaufman-esque blurring of the line between actual celebrity insanity and genius performance art. Even his unexpected and critically controversial devotion to autotune on 2008’s 808s & Heartbreak seemed to have music writers wondering if he’d just pulled a fast one on them.

Kanye was everywhere this year! He was in your Internet memes! He was all over your TMZ! He was even in the audience of your off-off-Broadway show!

Here are some of the highlights…

 

Even more strange than the fact that they staged it, is the fact that Kanye actually showed up to an off-off Broadway production called Why Won’t You Let Me Be Great!!!. WWYLMBG!!!, which ran for a month at New York’s PS122.  WWYLMBG!!! was a song-by-song interpretation of 808s and Heartbreak with twelve different performance groups each taking a track from the album and creating a dance/theatre/performance art interpretation. It’s easy to see how it might inflate your ego to see a dozen artists take your 6-month-old album and stage it for a paying audience. But what must it be like for Kanye to sit in that audience? We fault celebrities for having a warped sense of reality, but if the world around you started to react to your every move, it might be hard not to think you were the center of the universe.

Deeper down the rabbit hole is Kanye’s collaboration with Spike Jonze on the short film We Were Once a Fairy Tale. The ten minute night club meltdown casts Kanye as himself, wandering drunkenly through a velvet rope world, shouting at the staff, clumsily hitting on weirded-out party girls, and sloppily singing along when one of his songs is played. His celebrity status obliterated by drunkenness, he becomes just some tragic walking party foul. He hallucinates a steamy hookup with a beautiful club girl, but wakes up alone on a back-room couch, pants at ankles, and rushes to the bathroom to vomit. The film becomes more impressionistic as his heavings sound like samurai grunts, and his sick looks like red paint. Finding a knife below the toilet, he cuts open his stomach and extracts a small creature, who gives him a meaningful look, before cutting open its own stomach to and die before him.

Okay. Something about Kanye as a jet-setting superstar is just as absurd a façade as if he suddenly copped to being a gangster. While potentially plausible to an unwitting audience, upon closer inspection, it’s clearly a persona. Despite the subject matter seeming narcissistic, there is humility at the heart of this collaboration with Jonze. The character we follow is ultimately pathetic, and Kanye portrays the role with brutal honesty. Unable to derive any pleasure from his celebrity, each interaction only brings alienation and isolation. While it might be tasteless for a celebrity to bemoan their empty VIP lifestyle in a year where millions of Americans are out of work, at least the film demonstrates that Kanye knows how he is perceived. As for the suicidal rodent-creature torn from the rapper’s guts, I’ll leave that interpretation up to historians and fans of Where the Wild Things Are.

Lastly, and probably most far-reaching, was Kanye’s outburst at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. While it’s not uncommon for celebrities to act out at these events in order to garner publicity, the reaction to Kanye’s faux pas was operatic in scope. In case you hadn’t heard, our man hopped up on the stage during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech, swiped the microphone with a dismissive ‘Imma let you finish…’ and proceeded to stomp on her moment. Although he tried to hand the mic back after singing the praises of Beyonce, the moment had passed and Taylor walked away defeated. Unexpectedly, the event became an instant internet meme, with Kanye being photoshopped into pictures of Chairman Mao, Elen Degeneres and Barak Obama and many more, telling them he’s really happy for them, and ensuring them that he’s going to let them finish. After making public apologies on both his blog and the Jay Leno show (much better than sending flowers), the icing was really when, in an “off-the-record” press conference, President Barak Obama mentioned the incident and called Kanye a Jackass!

So what made Kanye so interesting this year? For me, it’s his increasing inability to interface with reality. He just looks like he’s on the Michael Jackson track – with pop stardom beginning to hem him into his own fantasy world. But he’s compelling because even as fame and fortune close in on him, and he approaches divinity, Kanye seems to have left a light on the attic. A part of his mind that sees how strange it all is, and clings to the receding reality of everyday mortals. A tragic figure who sees what he is becoming, but is somehow unable or unwilling to stop it.

But who am I to judge? I might have a hard time taking reality seriously too, if I was being sued by “Evil” Knievel.

-Zeb L. West, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 17

Camera Obscura
My Maudlin Career

Camera Obscura made a huge artistic leap between their 2003 and 2006 albums. The former, Underachievers Please Try Harder rested comfortably on bandleader Tracyanne Campbell’s songwriting. Campbell possessed immaculate craft, but couched it in twee compositions that directly recalled Belle and Sebastian—which made them delightful, if easily forgettable. When Let’s Get Out of the Country arrived three years later, the band had fleshed out Campbell’s songs with sweeping baroque arrangements, girl group harmonies, and rhythms built for engagement slightly more strenuous than bobbing along in a beanbag chair. It was a watershed moment for Camera Obscura, their critical and commercial peak, with 3 singles charting in the UK. More importantly, the six-piece ensemble finally seemed invested in its own sound—as opposed to someone else’s, or a scene’s, or a genre’s. Campbell had some musical muscle behind her, and it appeared to inspire a new confidence in her singing and songwriting.

My Maudlin Career, this year’s follow-up to Let’s Get Out of the Country, does everything a follow-up to a career peak should. Camera Obscura throws itself completely behind its new aesthetic, for an album of spit-shined orchestral pop. The compositions on My Maudlin Career are absolutely unreal, especially for a band that, six years ago, seemed like it could only do one thing. The album’s title track, for example, finds one of Campbell’s richest, most rewarding melodies wrapped around a shambling piano fragment that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Four Tet track. The delicate piano line is held in place by a swooping string orchestration, and the song culminates with a big electric guitar solo. With those diverse stylistic touch points, “My Maudlin Career” could’ve easily come off as a disastrous mess; instead, it’s played with a grandiosity that makes it one of the album’s best tunes.

Running counter to the band’s bold production is Campbell’s songwriting, which has grown markedly deeper and more tangled. Her songs aren’t as immediately catchy as on Let’s Get Out of the Country, but her denser songwriting makes for a more rewarding experience. There’s something sinister lurking behind “The Sweetest Thing.” Ostensibly about how much Campbell likes her man, her affection is contingent on his sobriety. The ballads, which populate nearly half of the album, go for an even longer payoff; they’re songs that bide their time until they put the hooks in you—something Campbell would never have attempted even an album ago. My Maudlin Career revels in that maturity, backwards and forwards. On the title track, Campbell sings, “This maudlin career has come to an end/ I don’t want to be sad again.” With music as sumptuous and rich as this, she might just be able to pull that off.

-Martin Brown, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 18

 The Flaming Lips
Embroynic

Wayne Coyne's take on each track of Embroynic, from the Fly.

‘Convinced Of The Hex’ 

Wayne says: “This was our first successful attempt at merging a low-fi distortion jam with hi-fi computer overdubs. This was the first in a series of lyrics inspired by repeated viewings of the controversial film ‘The Night Porter’ (made in 1974 by the radical Italian director Liliana Cavani). Its themes of submission and obsessions and cruelty and pleasure really put the zap on my sleep-deprived head.”

The Night Porter is an odd little movie that I can't imagine watching repeatedly, but it is a good odd little movie. Most people remember that the woman in it covers her nipples with swastikas made out of tape. Most people who have seen it have seen it because it's in the Criterion Collection.

‘The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine’ 

Wayne says: “A simple rhythmic mantra about the meaning of the concepts of power and submission and nature vs. technology – but not for defiant reasons – to be in awe of things that have power; even if it has the power to control you. To mentally get past the fear of being dominated and to embrace the realization of our helplessness.”

Wait, so not wanting to be spanked is about fear? I just don't want to be spanked.

‘Evil’ 

Wayne says: “An underlying story of regretting not being able to detect and understand evil, being haunted by how kind, gentle creatures are easily overpowered by the violent, mean beings. Humans are capable of such horrible things and create so much suffering in the world.”

At some point in the future, the fact that evil overpowers the kind and the gentle has to give way to the realization that being kind and gentle is basically asking for it.

‘Aquarius Sabotage’ 

Wayne says: “Another of the early freak-out jams that showed us a new way. We began to name our free-form sessions using astrological signs. We didn’t know how many we’d end up with, so this naming system was a solution to keeping track. But it quickly began to colour what the little pieces of music meant. I guess everybody already has an abstract concept in their mind that is evoked by the zodiac stuff.”

I don't have an abstract concept in my mind when zodiac crap comes up. It's a very specific dislike, involving violence.

Okay, that's enough of that. Flaming Lips, Embryonic: it's an album. It's a long album, it's an old school double album, according to the Coyne. It's messy, indulgent, and Karen O recorded her vocals over the phone. It's extravagant for no reason other than being extravagant, it has a nice long nudie video where a bunch of naked hippies ride bikes and dance in the woods with a gigantic Muppet vagina, and the explanations for the songs stretch credibility so much that it almost seems like the Lips might be having a larf, or taking the piss, or however one phrases their personal version of "seriously?"

The Lips can come up with explanations until their hair falls out, what matters in music is the music, less so the creative process. (Which is more exciting? Watching Lebron James school the fuck out of the Lakers, or watching Lebron James run laps? One is magic, the other is practice.) 

‘Watching The Planets’ 

Wayne says: “Tribal conquering dirge. Karen O kicks in singing with me and Steven. A final revelation that celebrates the power of nature and implies that the only laws worth obeying are the laws one makes for oneself. Experience is the only teacher…”

Experience is the only teacher, there's some truth to that. Exploration though--that's the theme of Embryonic, that's how it came about. Experience is the spine: the Lips couldn't have made a messy double album if they hadn't spent the post-Soft Bulletin period attempting various forms of controlled detonation. Again, it's the Derek Bailey thing, the Sonic Youth thing--improvisation sucks all of the time, every fucking time, except when it doesn't, which is almost never. And the only time that almost never becomes well okay, it's because the people involved know the rules: can they play a song. can they sing a song. can they make an album made up of songs they play and sing. And the Lips can, and the Lips have, and on Embryonic, the Lips did--their heaviest yet, their funniest yet. But unlike their previous hit records--and it's still a little bit odd to think that this band has actually produced hit records, but fucking A have they--Embryonic is a messy pile of laundry, dumped all over the floor of sound. It's big & stupid, it's horny & obnoxious, it's fucked up, and it's right. And what does Wayne have to say about what it was like to create it?

"We did not think too much about what we were doing or what we would become."

Thank God for that.

-Tucker Stone, 2009