“This thing is totally gone”

Josh Hurst raves about The Flaming Lips’ Embryonic:

They’ve made good albums and so-so albums, but they’ve never made a slight album, and, more than anything they’ve yet done, Embryonic has the weight of a masterpiece. An album as a statement is an antiquated notion in the age of the iPod, but it’s those little quirks that make the Flaming Lips a band of utter fearlessness and devotion to their art, no matter how far-flung or out-there it may be. Their records are all the better for it, especially this one: The Flaming Lips chart a course for the farthest depths of inner and outer space, and the result is an album of ambition and audacity, sounding both like a summation and a new beginning.