Flaming Lips, performing at Cosmo, embrace freedom of being different

It was 1988, and the members of the Flaming Lips were driving back home to their native Oklahoma City from a gig on the West Coast when they decided to stop in Vegas.

Their skin was gray. They looked like ashen, goth zombies.

Singer Wayne Coyne explains.

"Back then, we would dye all of our clothes black," he says. "This was before you could just go to the Gap or Urban Outfitters and buy black jeans and black T-shirts. I know it seems weird, but you couldn't do that. So we would get all of our jeans and T-shirts, and we would cook them on the stove at our house, and then we would wear these black clothes and go out and play shows. We wouldn't wash these clothes, because we wanted them to be really black. We couldn't tell, but little by little, we were all turning gray, because the dye was getting on us.

"We pull into Las Vegas, and we were going to the Barbary Coast (now Bill's Gamblin' Hall). The Barbary Coast was having a strike by its employees at the front of it. Us not being socialists or whatever, we were like, 'I don't really care. I don't know what your dilemma is.' We walked right through the picket line, expecting to get a little flak. As we were approaching the picket line, some guy in the line said, 'Look everybody! It's Halloween at the Barbary Coast,' seeing that we were these freaks, and that became one of our most beloved songs from that era: 'Halloween at the Barbary Coast.' "

Coyne chuckles at the recollection.

"I'm all up for weirdness," he says, before pretty much giving voice to his band's operating principle. "I like to do different things and see what happens."

To wit: the Flaming Lips' latest studio effort, and 12th overall, the equally sweeping and severe-sounding double album "Embryonic."

Is it a nightmare or a daydream?

Frequently, it sounds like both, simultaneously.

Attempting to navigate "Embryonic," at least at first, is akin to trying to find your way through some dense forest late on a moonless night.

It's an immersive experience, an album that you don't listen to as much as get lost in.

There are processed beats that reverberate like percussive bullets bouncing off sheet metal; heavily reverbed vocals that echo like they were sung from the depths of a canyon. (At times, Coyne's voice sounds like it was beamed in from another dimension, distant and shapeless, as extraterrestrial as a UFO sighting.)

There are symphonic touches: swelling cello and majestic sounding synth that wouldn't feel out of place on the soundtrack to a particularly disquieting sci-fi flick.

There are choral flourishes, what sounds like a stampeding marching band and German mathematician Thorsten Wörmann breaking down equations involving polynomial rings.

And is that Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontlady Karen O. braying like a wolf in the background?

The imagery is discomfiting, in places: One song, "The Ego's Last Stand," was inspired by Coyne's watching a kitten die on his mother's porch.

"That was one of the things about 'Embryonic,' it felt kind of disturbingly self-indulgent, so the songs became about your suffering and my pleasure or anything that let us be more intense and lose ourselves in this intensity," Coyne says. "That seemed to me to make this record go."

There seem to be some recurrent themes: the role of technology in the pursuit of higher existential truths and the limits of human understanding when it comes to grasping a deeper meaning in the world around us.

"Nature makes us all complete," Coyne sings on "Silver Trembling Hands," a sentiment that seems to be at least one of the central motifs on "Embryonic," which condenses the Lips' tangent-filled career into perhaps the band's most boundless, exploratory collection of material.

It's an album that establishes an ominous mood early on and sustains it, largely forsaking the idiosyncratic, changeling pop of the band's past few records and the various trademarks associated with them -- big, shiny choruses, bright hooks, a sense of buoyancy.

"We were being very wishy-washy about, 'Oh, maybe some of these songs are just too weird or too dark, why don't we have some other things in there?' " Coyne says. "We have so many records that are, for lack of a better word, optimistic and have major chords, and I know that we'd been leaning towards this type of music for a while. So I said, 'I don't care; why don't just we do this other weird thing?' If you make it past the first three or four songs, then you're in it with us. Sometimes I put on a record simply because I want to be in that mood for an hour. I think we tried to do that with 'Embryonic' for sure."

All of this makes "Embryonic" a challenge to get one's head around initially: It's been out for a year and a half, and it takes at least that long to digest.

But that's what makes it such an exhilarating listen.

And besides, if you can't always figure out where these dudes are heading, don't sweat it, because neither can they.

"We like having surprises, and we like not always being dictated by rhythms and notes and chords. Sometimes we want to be free and just not know what the music is going to do," Coyne says. "You make this music in the most intuitive way you can. It's like masturbating: You're really just doing it because you like it."

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.