(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.) 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. 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. These pendulum shifts-from frustrating to fascinating and back again-play out within the songs themselves. 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.”) 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 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. 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. 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.
By comparison, Oczy Mlody feels more, well, embryonic. 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.Īs 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. 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. have adapted their low-end theories to the Lips’ future-shocked psych-pop.īut 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.
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. 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). Oczy Mlody is a Polish phrase that translates to “eyes of the young,” and, here, the Lips strap them on like a VR headset. 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.Ĭyrus 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.
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.
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