The Flaming Lips: Psyched Out

Seattle-based music journalist and frequent MSN contributor Jonathan Zwickel cornered the Flaming Lips' impish front man, Wayne Coyne, during the band's late summer concert swing through the Northwest

By Jonathan Zwickel
Special to MSN Music

Behold, the Flaming Lips! The freakiest, deakiest, weirdest pop group in the world! The most reliably unpredictable major-label act in existence! A mind-warping musical drug dosing the mainstream!

From the corn and dust of their Oklahoma City home, the Lips have mutated like radioactive jackalopes during their decades-spanning existence: from early '80s unschooled Okie art punks to the mid-'90s alternative-rockers that spawned the college radio hit "She Don't Use Jelly" to the daring experimentalists of "Zaireeka" to Grammy-winning pop icons of "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" to the psychedelic techno-shamans that spawned the eerie, groovy, spacious sound of "Embryonic," album No. 12, which arrived in a furry brown wrapper last week.

Singer/auteur Wayne Coyne and bassist Michael Ivins have seen members come and go (a few of them Coyne's siblings) since the band's beginnings. Multi-instrumentalist Steve Drozd, widely acknowledged as the group's musical genius, came aboard in 1991; drummer Kliph Scurlock in 2002. Thanks to the most ecstatic live show in music (a swirl of P.T. Barnum, Cecil B. DeMille, Pokémon, "Rocky Horror," and the Pentecostal church) and a string of brilliant albums, the Lips' popularity has exploded over the past decade. Their songs have won Grammys and underscored Nissan commercials. For a moment there it seemed that they were destined to semi-normal pop band status.

"Embryonic" proves that the Flaming Lips are in fact totally insane. Lo-fi jams blend in and out of each other, instruments are distorted inscrutably, the disembodied voice of German mathematician Dr. Thorsten Wörmann discusses polynomial rings, and Karen O barks like a Gila monster. "Embryonic" sounds like a radio play from another dimension. It's a new chapter in the Flaming Lips handbook for interesting living, more art than music, more ongoing humanist development project than band.