Embryonic (Remastered) The Flaming Lips

• 1Convinced of the Hex03:56
• 2The Sparrow Looks Up At the Machine04:10
• 3Evil05:44
• 4Aquarius Sabotage02:10
• 5See the Leaves04:24
• 6If02:04
• 7Gemini Syringes03:41
• 8Your Bats02:34
• 9Powerless06:56
• 10The Ego's Last Stand05:41
• 11I Can Be a Frog02:13
• 12Sagittarius Silver Announcement03:00
• 13Worm Mountain05:21
• 14Scorpio Sword02:01
• 15The Impulse03:29
• 16Silver Trembling Hands03:58
• 17Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast03:44
• 18Watching the Planets05:17
• Total Runtime01:10:23

Info for Embryonic (Remastered)

After lauded indie albums, The Flaming Lips debuted on Warner Bros. with 1991's Hit To Death In The Future Head, Transmissions From The Satellite Heart and Clouds Taste Metallic followed. 1999's The Soft Bulletin topped numerous year-end best-of lists and helped rank the band among the most influential in the world. 2002's Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots ranked #4 in Spin and #11 in NME on their end-of-yearlists, and won a Grammy. The band's full length feature film and score album Christmas On Mars received critical acclaim at screenings across the country in 2008.

„The Flaming Lips have called theirs an “accidental career”, which is one way of summing up the haphazard nature of their quarter-century trajectory, lurching from breakthrough radio hits like 1993’s She Don’t Use Jelly to quadraphonic experimentation on 1997’s Zaireeka, their only consideration apparently to do whatever the hell they feel like at any given moment.

And so Oklahoma’s finest have decided to follow the commercially successful triptych of The Soft Bulletin (1998), Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002) and At War With the Mystics (2006) with a double-CD of their least accessible material since, well, Zaireeka.

Of course, being the Lips, even amid the squalls of noise and synth surges, there are beauteous melodies, but there are no accessible space-soul song-suites as per At War..., nor is there a Do You Realize?? on this 18-track collection. The closest things are The Impulse, a gorgeous simple chord sequence with a vocoder’d top-line melody that sounds like something off Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak, and IF, an odd little fractured ballad sung by multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd that sounds like something from the Alex Chilton or Skip Spence twilight zones.

More typical of this sprawling, 72-minute set is Aquarius Sabotage, a screeching, careening brutal/beautiful melee that combines harps and feedback – it’s like hearing three different songs at once – and approximates the sound of early-70s Miles Davis playing the work of Yes. The freak-out, freeform jam session vibe is sustained throughout and reaches a peak of phantasmagorical wondrousness on Silver Trembling Hands – imagine Pink Floyd’s One of These Days performed by Bitches Brew-era Miles, conducted by Burt Bacharach, with Bill Bruford on drums and the Six Million Dollar Man on bass. Typical of the Lips to make the obvious album opener the 16th track.

There are instances of Led Zep-ish power and gossamer interludes, moments when the Lips square the circle between Americana, psychedelia and prog, and special guests including Karen O, Lips heirs MGMT and a mathematician called Thorsten Wörmann – go figure indeed.

Embryonic may not sell as many copies or win as many converts as Bulletin or Yoshimi, but it’s another wonderful album – a veritable trove of speaker-pummelling delights – from the most consistently inventive and thrilling American band, R.E.M. included, of the last 25 years.“ (Paul Lester, BBC Review)

Wayne Coyne, guitar, bass, keyboards, vocoder, vocals
Steven Drozd, guitars, keyboards, drums, bass, vocals, lead vocals on "If"
Michael Ivins, bass, keyboards, guitar
Kliph Scurlock, drums, percussion

Recorded February–July 2009 at Tarbox Road Studios, Cassadaga, New York & Dull Roar Studios, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Produced by The Flaming Lips, Dave Fridmann, Scott Booker

Digitally remastered

The Flaming Lips are an American rock band, formed in Norman, Oklahoma in 1983.

Melodically, their sound contains lush, multi-layered, psychedelic rock arrangements, but lyrically their compositions show elements of space rock, including unusual song and album titles—such as "Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles", "Free Radicals (A Hallucination of the Christmas Skeleton Pleading with a Suicide Bomber)" and "Yeah, I Know It's a Drag... But Wastin' Pigs Is Still Radical". They are also acclaimed for their elaborate live shows, which feature costumes, balloons, puppets, video projections, complex stage light configurations, giant hands, large amounts of confetti, and frontman Wayne Coyne's signature man-sized plastic bubble, in which he traverses the audience. In 2002, Q magazine named The Flaming Lips one of the "50 Bands to See Before You Die".

The group recorded several albums and EPs on an indie label, Restless, in the 1980s and early 1990s. After signing to Warner Brothers, they scored a hit in 1993 with "She Don't Use Jelly". Although it has been their only hit single in the U.S., the band has maintained critical respect and, to a lesser extent, commercial viability through albums such as 1999's The Soft Bulletin (which was NME magazine's Album of the Year) and 2002's Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. They have had more hit singles in the UK and Europe than in the U.S. In February 2007, they were nominated for a 2007 BRIT Award in the "Best International Act" category. By 2007, the group garnered three Grammy Awards, including two for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.

On October 13, 2009 the group released their latest studio album, titled Embryonic. On December 22, 2009, the Flaming Lips released a remake of the 1973 Pink Floyd album The Dark Side Of The Moon. In 2011, the band announced plans to release new songs in every month of the year, with the entire process filmed.

This album contains no booklet.