Oczy Mlody

What makes Oczy Mlody so enthralling is that the Flaming Lips are ambitious in their exploration of the aftermath of their typical spectacle.

A couple of lesser tracks bloat into shapeless abstraction, but overall this is a sonically lavish and formally bold reinvention.

It amounts to one of the more dense, layered, anxious, and fun things they have released in a long time.

Oczy Mlody fluently balances three decades of untamed experimentation with the poppier sensibilities they've gained along the way. [Feb 2017, p.51]

The Lips return with a moody, industrial, and hypnotic CD that’s probably what Major Tom would be listening to, sitting in his tin can.

Oczy Mlody re-presents Flaming Lips as a band to be taken seriously once again, despite how much fun they’re clearly having doing it.

The instrumentation here is expectedly psychedelic, anchored in both freeform jams and trip-hop grooves. But somehow the collective makes the two opposing forces, which read like they were picked via pulling genres out of a hat, actually work thanks in no small part to Steven Drozd’s delicate instrumental blending.

Somewhere in the haze lurks their old knack for writing great, off-kilter pop songs that reflect and escape the bewildering world around us.

It’s a lovely, silly, serious work that draws one in despite the bursts of utopian cosmo-babble.

Ok, some of their sillier excesses may jar ever so slightly (unicorns, faeries, witches, wizards and frogs with demon eyes can all be found here, so some strapping yourself in may be required) and fans may well feel the absence of a true pop banger à la Race For The Prize or She Don’t Use Jelly. In every other aspect, however, this is The Flaming Lips on top of their game: refracting the weirdness of the world through a youthful sense of awe and wonder.

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.

They’ve managed to meld together the grand themes of ‘The Soft Bulletin’ and ‘Yoshimi…’ with some of the experimentation of ‘Embryonic’ and ‘The Terror’, and it makes for a fascinating return.

This time, the music took clear precedence over the concept, and that's worthy of rejoicing. [Jan-March 2017, p.65]

With Oczy Mlody, they remind us once again that they're also great songwriters. [Feb 2017, p.110]

It’s hard to place Oczy Mlody into a direct political context, as the record was finished before the election results, but the grim Lips seem ever more at home in this climate.

Wayne Coyne, Steven Drozd and company soften some of The Terror's rough edges in favor of a more eclectic, melodic sound that spans hip-hop, prog, and orchestral elements, sometimes in the course of a single song.

These pendulum shifts--from frustrating to fascinating and back again--play out within the songs themselves.

Oczy Mlody is the sonic equivalent of a deserted space-ship adrift in the cosmos, with Coyne as the lonely repair-bot dusting the diodes. A psych rock Passengers, then, rather than Barbarella.

Aside from a lousy plot, Oczy Mlody's only other failing is it's a slow build. The first half is sparse, uninviting and even a little drab.

The best moments here are either instrumental or wordless, when Coyne's voice--which, though never technically impressive, always fit perfectly with each album's sound, whether it was the ragged bombast of their Soft Bulletin-era epics or the hushed haunt of The Terror--becomes a whispering (or even whistling) texture. Lyrically, though, Coyne appears to have exhausted any last nuggets of profundity he once had.

If lyrics about mushrooms, unicorns and frogs are your jam, Coyne & Co. of course have you covered. The Naked Slaves and Amazon strippers do feel tiredly exploitative. [Feb 2017, p.93]

Oczy Mlody continues the Lips' longstanding mission to explore the joy and sadness of simple human consciousness, so that even when the album loses its footing--which it does, often--it never loses its way. [Feb 2017, p.34]

At times acutely annoyingly, far-out wackiness permeate much of the proceedings, rendering the album's less rewarding half as disposable as the band's frustratingly inconsequential recent self-indulgences ala messy guest star workout The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends (2012).

On Oczy Mlody they play out like a teenager trying to write a paper while he is high. The lyrics range from vaguely inspiring to cringe inducing, but just like their underrated At War With the Mystics, the record finishes with three strong tracks in a row.

While The Terror sharply divided fans and Oczy Mlody fails to to anything notable or interesting, Mlody isn’t a bad album: just a forgettable, dismissable one.

Rich in interesting R&B-influenced textures, its songs too often fail to engage, particularly on a ponderous second half.

Frequent changes in instrumentation and tone ultimately make Oczy Mlody feel unfocused, and without any of the band’s signature flamboyance to fall back on, it makes for a dull listen.

Much of what stems from his bands’ 15th standalone album never really gets past that “nothing of a track” phase. In fact, often the mood music Coyne and the gang have striven to make – as much about beats and textures as it is melody--is frustrating.

In some ways, it is as an exercise in stripping away everything that makes The Flaming Lips such a truly special group, leaving only that which serves as decorative tinsel to their music, hanging limp and lifelessly in the air.