The Guardian 80

(Bella Union)

Related: Wayne Coyne on Miley Cyrus: 'She sends me pictures of herself peeing'

It’s a long time since the Flaming Lips bothered the mainstream with the likes of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots; in the past decade, they’ve charted a stranger course, with freaky Beatles covers, 2013’s darkly wondrous The Terror and an unlikely bond with Miley Cyrus. More weirdness abounds on their 14th album. Described by frontman Wayne Coyne as sounding like “Syd Barratt meets A$AP Rocky”, meandering jams blur into trip-hop grooves, a narrative about “the love generation” and an actual frog chorus. However, somewhere in the haze lurks their old knack for writing great, off-kilter pop songs that reflect and escape the bewildering world around us. Cyrus props up for the sun-drenched, free festival electro vibes of We a Famly, while songs such as The Castle create a more melancholy bliss. Happiness and sadness collide most beautifully on Sunrise (Eyes of the Young), the prettiest thing they’ve done in years.

Drowned In Sound 80

At their peak, The Flaming Lips could take their listener into a completely different universe, be it one filled with Pink Robots (Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots) or into some sort of glorious kooky heaven (The Soft Bulletin). During this period the group were, undeniably, at their best. This was in no small part due to the huge melodies that slipped through their technicolour psych-pop parade.

However, in recent years, it has felt like the group have been praying at the alter of Dr Timothy Leary a bit too much. Embryonic from 2009, and 2013’s The Terror rid the group of everything that made them great, stripping away the pop hooks in favour of prog-inspired meanders into a world less interesting than 'real life'. These slip ups, or whatever you’d like to call them, makes Oczy Mlody, the group’s fifteenth studio album feel sort of make or break.

Things start well – very well. Opener ‘How’ is a synth rock monster of a song. The pulsating keyboard notes set out an apocalyptic setting that remains throughout the record. Wayne Coyle’s signature childlike vocals add a dash of strange optimism, suggesting that the oncoming dread might be something to celebrate, rather than fear.

‘Sunrise (Eyes of the Young)’ and ‘Nigy Nie (Never No)’ are, for want of a better phrase, widescreen. You can immediately start to visualise the world Wayne Coyne and co are trying to create, a land filled with the fallen trees, multi-coloured swamps and deep blue skies. Both have a rather bizarre hip hop influence, the latter in particular sounds like the surreal bastard child of Flying Lotus and J Dilla. If that doesn’t compel you to give the song a google right now, then I think me and you are going to fall out.

At times the record starts to feel like the audio equivalent to the last few installations of the Star Wars saga. There’s a joyous familiarity here, but with a few new and exciting additions chucked in for good measure. This is no bad thing, quite the opposite in fact. ‘Do Glory’ is the auto-tuned sequel to ‘The Race For The Prize’ sounding a heck of a lot like a mid-Noughties pop reincarnation of The Residents. As you can probably gather, the result is nothing short of amazing. There is a sort of toy box ambience that wraps itself around the music, almost as if all of your childhood toys are drowning in one of the land’s mystical ponds.

Lead single ‘The Castle’ leads us towards the climax of the journey. Coyne can’t half write a psychacana (psychedelic americana, for the uninitiated) masterpiece when he wants to. The track is all twinkly keyboard caresses and deep blobby bass. It is perhaps the closest you’re going to get to an aural cuddle, which I’m sure is something everyone needs after the year we’ve just been through.

With Oczy Mlody, The Flaming Lips have managed to take us on apocalyptic journey that’s also fun, which is no mean feat. If the 'real' end of the world is half as fun, we’ll all be alright.

Pitchfork 62

Last year was a relatively quiet one for the Flaming Lips. Sure, the Oklahoma vets take an average of four years or so between proper albums, but they’re rarely out of sight, whether they’re upholding their reputation as a festival clean-up worker’s worst nightmare, launching side projects, or just generating headlines over something outrageous Wayne Coyne has said/done. But, ironically, their most scattershot extracurricular activity to date—backing up Miley Cyrus on her teen pop-repudiating, Soundcloud-clogging Dead Petz project—has, in hindsight, proven to be a guiding light for this ever-exploratory band.

Over the past three years, Cyrus has gone from being Coyne’s instant Instagram BFF to becoming his go-to girl with kaleidoscope eyes to serving as the Lips’ muse—the potty-mouthed, pansexual Nico to their expanding plastic inflatable. It’s a friends-with-mutual-benefits relationship: Cyrus uses the Lips as a wrecking ball to her past, while the Lips use her a conduit to relive theirs.

Cyrus only appears on one song on the Lips’ new album, but the record wouldn’t sound the way it does without her presence in their lives. Oczy Mlody is a Polish phrase that translates to “eyes of the young,” and, here, the Lips strap them on like a VR headset. After spending much of 2013’s The Terror in a disorienting haze and ruminating on loss, lust, and impending apocalypse, on Oczy Mlody, Coyne reconnects with his childlike sense of wonder, populating its lyrical universe with unicorns, demon-eyed frogs, and wizards (not to mention enough f-bombs to challenge Cyrus in a swear-jar contest). And joining Cyrus’ squad shaped the album’s sonic direction as well: After sharing the console with Mike WiLL Made-It on Dead Petz and becoming party pals with A$AP Rocky, Coyne and co. have adapted their low-end theories to the Lips’ future-shocked psych-pop.

But if Oczy Mlody lacks The Terror’s weighty themes, it retains its claustrophobic, science-lab atmosphere, yielding songs as dense, tangled, and intricately structured as the gear set-up likely required to produce them. The Lips haven’t functioned as a straight-up rock band for two decades now, but never have they felt more like a pure studio entity—this is their first album to barely feature any (perceptible) drums, leaning instead on a wobbly rhythmic foundation of tinny programmed beats, bass-frequency throbs, and finger-snapping hooks. But while Oczy Mlody finds the Lips still eager to stretch the parameters of their aesthetic 30-plus years into the game, this time, it leaves them sounding a little distended and shapeless.

As harebrained as some of the Lips’ sideline experiments can seem, all those existentialist sci-fi-flick soundtracks, six-hour jams, and kooky karaoke exercises are important whiteboard workshop exercises for ideas that eventually get refined into holistic, conceptually focussed albums like The Terror and its predecessor, Embryonic. By comparison, Oczy Mlody feels more, well, embryonic. If the Lips’ 2009 opus introduced this current iteration of the band with a thundering Soft Bulletin-sized statement, and The Terror was its more subdued Yoshimi-scaled counterpoint, then Oczy Mlody is the At War With the Mystics moment, where the band sounds like it’s being pulled into too many directions at once, and struggling to reconcile their crowd-pleasing and contrarian tendencies.

Oczy Mlody’s fairy-tale fantasias are hardly unchartered terrain for a band that found its greatest success making a quasi-concept album about karate battles with robots; the difference here is that the whimsy is delivered in stern, serious tones, as if reciting a children’s storybook as docudrama. But just when you’re willing to overlook the goofy lyrics of a song like “There Should Be Unicorns” (“There should be day-glo strippers/Ones from the Amazon!”) and surrender to its tense, twitchy electro groove, the hypnotic spell is broken by a silly spoken-word intrusion from comedian Reggie Watts where he ruminates on horn-headed horses like Isaac Hayes doing pillow talk. The song finds a superior counterpart in “One Night While Hunting for Faeries and Witches and Wizards to Kill,” another tale of an epic quest for mythical creatures—set to an intensifying techno-powered thrust. But in lieu of a dramatic finale, it simply dissolves into the chintzy, chipmunked synth pop of “Do Glowy.” (Sample lyric: “Glowy, glowy, go/Let’s get together, yeah/Glow, glow, glow, glow.”)

These pendulum shifts—from frustrating to fascinating and back again—play out within the songs themselves. While the compelling near-instrumental “Nigdy Nie (Never No)” navigates a linear path from cosmic avant-R&B reverie to subwoofered robo-funk, dead-weight tracks like “Galaxy I Sink” and “Listening to the Frogs With Demon Eyes” force you to wade through meandering tracts of sputtering drum machines and free-floating guitar jangle to reach their brief, sky-clearing moments of radiance. Even a pretty reprieve like “Sunrise (Eyes of the Young)”—which repurposes a melody previously heard on Cyrus’ “The Floyd Song (Sunrise)”—isn’t immune to the album’s impulsive tendencies, with each plaintive verse answered by a momentum-stalling choral flourish that feels like a placeholder for a proper chorus. (The album boasts a better ballad in “The Castle,” a bittersweet, trip-hoppy serenade that would sound right at home on the back half of Yoshimi.)

Where The Terror appended its sullen song cycle with an ebullient bonus track (“The Sun Blows Up”), Oczy Mlody’s unlikely closer—the Coyne/Cyrus duet “We a Famly”—is presented as part of the official tracklist. But given the scatterbrained nature of all that precedes it, the song’s appearance is both moot and highly welcome. “We a Famly” reportedly dates back to the Dead Petz sessions, and it differs from the rest of Oczy Mlody in every possible way, from its traditional rock-anthem structure, to its real-world references to Wichita, to the presence of a joyous, arm-swaying chorus on a record that otherwise does its best to avoid them. Certainly, “We a Famly” will give amorous Lips fans something else to slow-dance to at their weddings besides “Do You Realize??” But in these divisive times, the song also functions as a more pointed statement of solidarity—for America at large, or, at the very least, among two generations of Oklahoma freaks who prove the president-elect doesn’t have a monopoly on watersports-related headlines in 2017.

The Guardian 40

(Bella Union)

While continuing in the subdued, synth-heavy vein of 2013’s The Terror, the 15th album from Oklahoma psychedelicists the Flaming Lips is at least less lyrically bleak, its conceptual arc encompassing freely defecating green-eyed unicorns, sleep and futuristic drugs. Rich in interesting R&B-influenced textures, its songs too often fail to engage, particularly on a ponderous second half. And there’s still no solution to the recurring problem they’ve had since ditching the (often cloying) euphoria of their late 90s/early 00s commercial peak: the vocal shortcomings of Wayne Coyne – a man with a voice only Ian Brown’s mother could love – seem so much more exposed. Indeed, it’s telling that the strongest song here is the closing We a Famly, on which he’s helped out by Miley Cyrus.

Tiny Mix Tapes 30

The Flaming Lips
Oczy Mlody

[Warner Bros.; 2017]

Rating: 1.5/5