Favourite Albums of 2011 #3: "Embryonic"

The Flaming Lips
Embryonic [2009]

There are a lot of people who say that the Flaming Lips have gone all conventional and unadventurous. I think they need to listen to this album. Maybe it is not the kind of unconventional and adventurous that earns the respect of the more outré-loving members of Frank's APA (in whose pages this first appeared), but it is rather out there compared to anything Joe Normal listens to*. Not that there is anything wrong with what Joe Normal likes, but it is great that this kind of semi-psych weirdo music can find something approximating to a mass audience.

As previously discussed, the record cover seems to feature Wayne Coyne being born out of a woman's lady parts.

original review

image source

*I expect some disagreement with this proposition.

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2011 Favourite Albums

I have been thinking about what were my favourite new to me records of 2011. And the following are the ones I came up with. A fuller write-up of these will appear soon in the pages of Frank's APA and ultimately on Inuit Panda. Where possible I have linked back to my original reviews of these records.

Jane Weaver
The Fallen By Watch Bird [2010]

My favourite record is this piece of somewhat psychey neo-folk from Jane Weaver, Bird Records supremo. If strange folky sounds are your thing then check this out.

Bo Hansson
Lord of the Rings [1970]

Mr Hansson wrote his own musical accompaniment to the Tolkien-classic back in the past. He seems a bit more interested in the dark and sinister aspects of the great book.

The Flaming Lips
Embryonic [2009]

Some say that the Flaming Lips have become dull and mainstream. They may not have listened to this.

Broadcast & The Focus Group
Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age [2009]

Spooky electronic music from this interesting collaboration, lent a certain poignancy by the recent death of Trish Keenan of Broadcast.

Dean & Britta
13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol's Screen Tests [2010]

A series of tunes recorded to accompany showings of Andy Warhol screen tests, some covers and some original. Sonic Boom has some production input and it does all end up sounding a bit neo-shoe gaze, but in a good way.

Tom Tom Club
[Untitled First Album] [1982]

Funky side project band from Talking Heads rhythm section, together with input from their friends and relations. Impossible not to like.

Richard Thompson
1000 Years of Popular Music [live] [2006]

Mr Thompson and his two lady friends perform tunes from the last thousand years, including quite a few pop tunes of the last 100 years. Given that this is Richard Thompson we are talking about, most of these songs are a bit sadface.

Black Mountain Transmitter
Black Goat of the Woods [2009]

This seems to be an Irish-made record, so I am for once doing my bit for Team Ireland. It is like a soundtrack to a low budget 1980s horror film, and all sounds vaguely Lovecraftian. Iä! Iä!

Magnet & Paul Giovanni
The Wicker Man OST [1973]

A collection of original neo folkie tunes and creepy instrumental pieces from the film that made people think twice about trips to isolated Scottish islands.

v/a nlgbbbblth CD 11.14: Níl sé anseo [CD-R]

Mr Nlgbbbblth's offering is a rare example of a CD-R that deserves a commercial release, painting as it does a picture of Ireland in the late 1970s and early 1980s from musical pieces, TV jingles, snippets of news programmes, and so on. Also features priests.

v/a Rajasthani Street Music [CD-R]

This is a version of something due to appear on Sublime Frequencies at some stage. It is a selection of pieces recorded by Mr Seb Bassleer on a trip to India and is delightful to the ear.

Ween
Thom's Ween TOAD [CD-R]

This CD-R from my old friend and quaffing partner Thom has been my introduction to the music of Ween – and I like it.


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Forbidden Fruit, Part 3 – Some Positivity

this is episode 3 of my account of the ghastly Forbidden Fruit festival

After Yo La Tengo I was seriously thinking of just cutting my losses and heading home for a nice sherry or a warming cup of cocoa, but my beloved persuaded me to stay on for the headliners, who were admittedly the main reason I had come down to Forbidden Fruit in the first place. And these people were… The Flaming Lips, a band I had basically not seen since their tour after the first Bowlie Weekender (or maybe I also saw them at an early ATP). Back then, they were a somewhat avant-garde indie rock band, sometimes associated with Mercury Rev, who were beginning to achieve some recognition on the back of bizarre live shows and the sheer attritional force of a band that will not stop plugging away. Since then, the Flaming Lips had become surprisingly popular and were now almost a default festival headliner band, largely on the strength of a truly spectacular live show. My beloved persuaded me that this was something we had to see – that no matter how squalid Forbidden Fruit was, we had to bear the horror and stay to see the elephant.

I appreciate that, at this stage of the game, I am basically the last person in the world to see the Flaming Lips spectacular live show, so maybe I do not need to say too much about it. Still, something must be said. It is… spectacular. They come on through a door on a screen on which super-bright images are projected, while the audience is bathed in strobe lights. The sides of the stage are filled with randomers dressed as characters from The Wizard of Oz. Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips gets into a giant ball and rolls across the audience. Balloons, confetti, and various other objects are blasted in the vague direction of the audience. Basically, this is the thing to show anyone who moans about how today's bands don't know how to put on a show*. The Flaming Lips had me grinning like a lunatic and seemed to, briefly, create a sense of genuine audience community. I fact, I actually had a pleasant conversation with a stranger who asserted that she was the actual giant woman on the screens behind the Flaming Lips (she had changed her hairstyle in the meantime, apparently).

And the music? You do hear people saying that for all the Flaming Lips amazing visual treats, the actual music is a bit pedestrian. I cannot agree to this, it still sounds way more avant-garde to me than anything you would normally get headlining a festival for trend people. OK, so they are not Boredoms, but it is intriguing that this kind of music can still find something approximating to a mass audience. That said, they do occasionally drift off into bland ballad territory (e.g. that dreadful 'Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots' song) but they soon come back to something off the wall.

I am surprisingly unfamiliar with the Flaming Lips on record, but they did play some songs I know. Sadly, not so much from the recent album Embryonic, so we did not get to join in with the animal noises on 'I Can Be A Frog'.

Still, all good things come to an end. The initial sense of audience community largely wore off as drunken munters started telling each other i) how much they were enjoying the gig and ii) how drunk they were. Once the Flaming Lips finished, I made my excuses and left.

* I am indebted to Sarah Dorman for this insight.

image source

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Three Records of Strange Music

Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age

Bo Hansson Lord of the Rings

The Flaming Lips Embryonic

I went music mad a while ago and brought these three records of weirdo music together on the one day (but not at the same tyme – last two were in Tower, but I could only find the first in HMV). The Broadcast and Focus Group album I of course acquired not long after hearing of Trish Keenan's death. It is an odd record, being in some respects a remixing of new Broadcast work by Mr Focus Group, while in other ways it seems like a record the Broadcasters made in direct collaboration with him. Some of it is song-based, in so far as the more recent music of Broadcast ever sounds like songs, while a lot of it seems like typical Focus Group sound-collage, albeit with a lot of the fragments seeming to have been culled from Broadcast's studio endeavours. It is meant to sound like the title suggests – calling to mind an occult investigation of the contemporary world.

I like it, but I must make certain warnings to the unwary who are thinking of approaching it. The record works best altogether, and not as separate tracks. One of the more song-based pieces is 'The Be Colony', featuring a delightfully narcotic vocal from Trish Keenan. I had previously heard it on the Rough Trade Counter Culture album for 2009, where it does not really make much impact. Listened to here, however, it seems like one of the best things ever.

Bo Hansson also died surprisingly recently. He was some old Swedish hippy who made records that maybe were not big sellers although they did have a considerable afterlife as cult artefacts. His Lord of the Rings album is, obviously, inspired by the Tolkien classic. Keyboard-heavy, it is more like a soundtrack to an imaginary film than a musical dramatisation of the book. Without any of the electronic trickery available to Broadcast (or the Focus Group) it manages to have a similarly occult feel to it. This is a record I have heard before, but the most striking part of it for me is the intro to 'The Black Riders (Flight to the Ford)'. And why? Well, this is used to soundtrack one of the pivotal scenes in Lukas Moodysson's film Together (the one about the Swedish hippies living in a commune in the 1970s, featuring loads of Swedish music from that era). The whole album is great and would work as a great soundtrack to sitting around in a relaxed frame of mind discussing important issues in the great book of the 20th century (like… what do people in Mordor eat? I mean, if the whole place is basically a volcanic slag heap, yet is full of the huge hosts of Sauron, what does he feed them on?)

And then to Embryonic. I had rather lost touch with The Flaming Lips. It seemed a bit like they had lost touch with their wayward art-nutter sides in favour of courting bland mainstream success with easily approached ballads like that one about someone called Yoshimi and her struggle against pink robots. But then I started hearing that they had gone all weird again. Doing a track-for-track cover of The Dark Side of the Moon suggested a certain return to odd form (or a certain desire to cover one of the most successful albums of all time, for cash), and then this album came out. You may have seen the cover – it's the one with Wayne Coyne looking like he is being born out of some lady's vagina. The music is from the more dense side of the Flaming Lips oeuvre, featuring not so much of the crooning ballads but a lot of funny noises and tracks that chug along in a distorted big rock kind of way. I am becoming quite fond of this record and so I am excited that the band are going to be playing in Dublin this summer, as the Flaming Lips have acquired the reputation as one of the great live bands of our times and I reckon these tracks would sound great live.

My favourite track on Embryonic of course is 'I Can Be A Frog', in which the lyrics go "She said* I can be a X", where X is the name of (usually) an animal, and they have Karen O on guest vocals doing noises over the phone for the appropriate animal. Rarrrr!

*I think it was Freaky Trigger's Tom Ewing who pointed out what a great idea it is to include the words "She said" in songs you write, as it suggests to your listeners that you might actually know some women.

Lord of the Rings image source

Embryonic image source

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