Embryonic

As they should, they did it different. The Flaming Lips’ latest is a turn away from the increasingly glossy symphonic-pop of their post-Soft Bulletin work, and yet it isn’t a turn back to their previous identity as acid-punks. Their least conventional work since 1997’s 4CD Zaireeka! – a sprawling, 70-minute panoply of (largely successful) experiments, an unashamedly ambitious prog splurge, even down to its Hipgnosis-goes-photomontage cover-art – but also, undoubtedly, a full-burn hit to the pleasure-centres. It is that now-rare, marvellous thing – a Flaming Lips album you actually remember after it finishes.

From the first spurts of tearing feedback and metallic synths that open ‘Convinced of the Hex’, immediately underpinned by a Bonham-via-Mantronix drum-pattern from Kliph Scurlock, you know this is something very different. The huge virtuosity that marked the rococo layer-cake productions of their last few albums is fed into making bewildering sprays of psychedelic fireworks, more achieved, if with perhaps less ragged verve, than their coarse and brilliant early work. Scattered throughout are irresistible thrash-out moments – instrumental freak-outs ‘Aquarius Sabotage’, ‘Worm Mountain’, like a burial mound of fuzz-boxes landing on top of you – but also strange, narcotic drifts – the suspended longing of ‘Evil’, the whimsical jaunt of ‘I Can Be A Frog’, Karen O cackling unsettlingly in the background, ‘Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast’ like a gathering of Eno’s Music For Airports choirs in the crackling aether. But in none of these explorations does their pop touch ever disappear: even the most mind-burning sonic pile-ups are arranged with the care of a gardener. Wayne Coyne’s vocodered whisper on combination space-fable/love-song (the best kind) ‘The Impulse’ might as well be Jeff Lynne on ‘Mr. Blue Sky’; the weirdness of his intergalactic evangelist turn on ‘Sagittarius Silver Announcement’ is only underscored by the conventionally ascending chorus, bathed in white light from the synths. And even this, as with so many of these songs, is refracted through a production haze quite unlike most rock albums – part in-the-red studio-jam, part interstellar-transmission, swimming in FX. When they finally hit spirally-ascending closer ‘Watch The Planets’, you’ve no choice but to take them at their work: it’s cosmic.

The critics had it that The Soft Bulletin marked the moment The Lips passed into maturity. They may have, now, to think again. Coyne may croon “I wish I could go back/Go back in time”, but this will leave you with the tang of the future on your tongue.