Review Summary: And God said, Let there be unicorns: and there were unicorns.
The Flaming Lips have always been, for better or worse, a
weird group. A career spanning over thirty years and fourteen albums, the Lips have showed no signs of slowing down or opting to shed their long-standing image as that one band that is often associated with the psychedelic side of modern rock music. This withstanding aesthetic perhaps came to its peak with 2013’s
The Terror, an album that took the Lips’ music and shed its wild psych pop sound to its very core, instead creating a slice of frighteningly isolated music that was anything
but dream-like. Where could the Lips go from there however? The increasingly drawn out experimental material that made up
The Terror and
Embryonic had perhaps reached its zenith, leading to what is possibly the band’s most scaled down effort since
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots –
Oczy Mlody. Gone was the harsh reality of its preceding album in favor of hazy, rhythm-driven psychedelic abandon. If
The Terror was the cold confrontation of your reality,
Oczy Mlody is the mystical retreat into your consciousness.
From the start of the opener
”Oczy Mlody”, there’s no sign of the overwhelming darkness that dominated a wealth of
The Terror’s songs, instead replacing the glitched-out overdriven electronics in favor of rhythmic EDM-esque beats and unwavering synthwork that brings the composition together neatly. This beat-driven principle is what defines the album as a whole and makes the individual songs themselves unique to the Lips’ canon. Yet it’s with this work that the songs themselves rarely work without the context of its album, and herein lies its greatest flaw that immediately brings about a distinct parallel to the politics-driven
At War With The Mystics. Very much like
Mystics,
Oczy features perhaps some of the Lips’ most intriguing material, but also features their most monotonous and tepid songwriting; both just happen to be overly long as well. It’s the first half of
Oczy Mlody that ultimately makes it worthy of being given a chance, whether it’s the EDM-influenced
”How??”; the humorous acid-drenched
”There Should Be Unicorns”, or the drama of
”Galaxy I Sink” that convinces you to listen to it. Moments like Reggie Watts’ monologue in the dying moments of
”Unicorns” and the subtleties of the compositions of works such as
”Nigdy Nie (Never No)” and
”One Night While Hunting for Faeries and Witches and Wizards to Kill” serve to make
Oczy Mlody an engaging listen at the very least.
However, it’s more difficult to really pin
Oczy Mlody down as an engaging experience due to its singular mood, the oft-uninspired (and at times, try-hard) lyricism and its failure to ultimately go anywhere as a complete work. It’s in the latter half, eventually, where
Oczy Mlody runs out of steam after its incredibly strong start and begins meandering toward a general sound that hardly has any room for variety nor creativity. Aside from the fast-paced
”Almost Home (Blisko Domu)”, the songs that make up the latter half of the album either fall flat due to its lack of variety and/or poor lyricism (
”The Castle”,
”Do Glowy”) or simply go nowhere and end up feeling more like an afterthought than an fully fleshed-out song (
”We A Famly”). Yet it’s in the utterly tedious slog of closer
”We A Famly” that the main theme of
Oczy Mlody truly makes itself known to its audience – that you’re not alone, a stark contrast to
The Terror’s reassurance otherwise that you were completely isolated from others. Where there was once no hope is now the realization that life ultimately goes on. In the end, it’s this sole element that brings
Oczy Mlody and its songs together to become a companion album to
The Terror in its contrasting themes, even if the end result is something that peaks far too early, wanders about for a moment and ends on an underwhelming note.
