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.