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Sound Reviews
Mission of Burma misses the mark while the Flaming Lips soar
By Troy Farah
Published on 11/05/2009
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Artist: Mission of Burma Album: The Sound, The Speed, The Light Rating: 3/5 stars
Eighties post-punk outfit Mission of Burma produced two albums in the new wave era as a challenge to current punk trends, yet it retained the hazy anger and strength of the movement. The band’s unconventional time signatures, scratchy tape effects and ear-splitting live acts rooted it among contemporaries as a fundamental and influential sound. Ironically, the band was so loud it had to break up when lead singer Roger Miller developed tinnitus. His condition causes his ears to never stop ringing, and during live shows he wore rifle-range headphones. The Sound, The Speed, The Light is Burma’s third album (fifth total) since the band reformed in 2002. After 20 years, it’s safe to say the original, vibrant sound Burma created wasn’t lost. But after all this time, it’s saturated and slightly out-of-place, like the band arrived at the wrong party. In response, Burma isn’t asking to be taken seriously anymore.
The Sound’s riff-heavy opener “1, 2, 3, Partyy!” is written like a joke, perhaps parodying their own hyped lifestyle. On “Blunder” the band humbly admits it isn’t perfect, something very un-rockstar, but they don’t apologize on “So F**k It,” the album’s most enjoyable cut. Overall, the album couldn’t be more solid, but something is still lacking. The veterans seem to feel they missed their big shot and now is the time to make up for it, but they also seem to realize they can’t. Even with a solid album, it just isn’t the ’80s anymore. Overall, The Sound, The Speed, The Light sounds more like a greatest-hits record than the next big thing, making Mission of Burma something to gloss over and forget.
Artist: The Flaming Lips
Album: Embryonic Rating: 4.5/5 stars
The Flaming Lips return with their 12th studio album, Embryonic, a sprawling, psychedelic mess that overwhelms and excites the senses. Seemingly a violent response to the mainstream success of the Lips’ pop-ish albums At War With the Mystics and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Embryonic is like stepping into a marsh—it only gets muddier the further down you go.
Much of the brain food behind the album resulted from free-form “freak-out” jam sessions that were named after astrological signs (see “Gemini Syringes,” “Scorpio Sword” and “Aquarius Sabotage.”) Their experimentation led to some of the greatest innovations in music this year. Everything—the bass, the guitar, the drums and lead singer Wayne Coyne’s voice—is distorted into an intense, squelching, cacophonic masterpiece.
The album lurches into turmoil with “Convinced of the Hex,” a sleep-deprived inspiration from the sado-masochistic film “The Night Porter.” Coyne described the song as his first successful attempt at “merging a low-fi distortion jam with hi-fi computer overdubs,” which just means it’s loud and grating. The rest of the album follows suit, with the heavy, bass-driven “See The Leaves” and “Worm Mountain” (which features MGMT’s vocals). But although Embryonic sounds disorientated and messy and screws with your head, it grows on you. The weirdness takes you to bizarre new places and almost primitively rediscovers the meanings of life and death.
Embryonic is somewhat of a concept album, each song exploring a different perspective on human nature, feeling powerless and lost against a wall of oppression and, finally, how to twist that feeling around into pleasure.
And the album isn’t all noise, it takes plenty of intermissions, slowing down for tracks like “Evil,” “IF” and “I Can Be a Frog,” the latter featuring the Karen O’s (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) seductive animalistic interjections. The Flaming Lips have really outdone themselves. Embryonic takes several listens to get into, but once there, it will deeply challenge many listeners’ ways of thinking—if not by the clever lyrics then by the unconventional musical delivery itself.
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