Oczy Mlody
| Flaming Lips
Oczy Mlody
Oczy Mlody [ˈɔt͡ʂɨ ˈmwɔdɨ] (an erroneous Polish phrase, which could mean "the young eyes") is the fourteenth studio album by experimental rock band The Flaming Lips, released on January 13, 2017, on Warner Bros in the US and Bella Union in the UK. It is the first album to feature Jake Ingalls who joined the group in 2013. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
Miley Cyrus only appears once on the Flaming Lips’ claustrophobic new full-length, but the record wouldn’t sound the way it does without her presence in their lives.
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The Guardian
More weirdness abounds on their 14th album. Described by frontman Wayne Coyne as sounding like “Syd Barratt meets A$AP Rocky”, meandering jams blur into trip-hop grooves, a narrative about “the love generation” and an actual frog chorus.
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Rolling Stone
The album is a bitter pill at first but it pays off to tune in and turn on.
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Sputnik Music
it’s this sole element that brings Oczy Mlody and its songs together to become a companion album to The Terror in its contrasting themes, even if the end result is something that peaks far too early, wanders about for a moment and ends on an underwhelming note.
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The Quietus
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.
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Tiny Mixtapes
Oczy Mlody is merely the end of one road for The Flaming Lips, and it won’t be too long before the band decides that it’s time for another reinvention.
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Slant
The result is that Oczy Mlody doesn’t overwhelm or immediately impress, but instead invites listeners into its elusory world of crossed senses, unassigned values, and blind turns, hoping they end up in the same place Coyne thinks he’s headed: to an idyllic future state that feels just like the past.
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Paste Music
Featuring Cyrus and her perfectly imperfect soprano, it’s a smoothed out, slap-happy battle cry, worthy of our dark times. It might be the freaks and weirdos against the world, but hey—at least we’re all in it together.
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The Line of Best Fit
Oczy Mlody sounds like a photocopy of the multicolour splendour of the Flaming Lips’ masterpieces.
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Clash
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.
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Head Stuff
There is no doubt that The Flaming Lips are a band who refused to get comfortable in one sound, you just wish the one chosen for Oczy Mlody wouldn’t seem so uncomfortable for them to preside in.
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Diamond in the Groove
I feel that this album is perhaps best enjoyed if put on in the background, or if you try to enjoy the spacey sounds, ambient air and electronic embellishments without thinking of the technicalities of song structure and writing.
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Contact Music
It's certainly not an album to cherry pick songs from, but the overall experience ensures that The Flaming Lips haven't exhausted their unique brand of weirdness yet.
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Music OMH
It’s possible that Oczy Mlody will disappoint those looking for an easy hit, or the sound of old-school Lips, but for those willing to persist and explore, it’s a work of nuance and intelligence.
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Slug Mag
The trash-compacted cosmic debris sounds that we’ve come to expect and adore surface once again on their new album, Oczy Mlody. It’s all here: the cold, clean drums, hornets’ nest bass buzz and keys straight out of an evil toy land.
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Under The Radar
Rather than covering Dark Side of the Moon, like the Lips did in 2009, they've composed a set of original songs which embody many of its same qualities. This time, the music took clear precedence over the concept, and that's worthy of rejoicing.
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Indie Central Music
The album is undeniably a major turning point in the band’s music – almost entirely abandoning their more familiar, guitar-based sound, and diving into the deep end of a much darker sounding, electro-based genre.
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Renowned For Sound
Flaming Lips fans are sure to have a lot of love for Oczy Mlody; there’s a lot to love here, and it’s an inarguably solid starting point for music in 2017.
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Independent
The instrumental title track encapsulates the album’s duality in musical form, with errantly puttering bass and wetly trembling beat behind a typically wistful keyboard figure: the combination of poignant melody and abrasive experimentalism that recalls The Residents, a comparison that crops up time and gain throughout Oczy Mlody.
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Spectrum Pulse
It doesn't really go anywhere, and it's a testament to how far The Flaming Lips have fallen that merely passable will be enough for some, but on enough drugs I can see this grabbing some interest.
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Spectrum Culture
Oczy Mlody chops up the best bits of the Flaming Lips’ kaleidoscopic past and reconfigures them into something fresh and new.
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The Young Folks
Oczy Mlody is a carefully crafted piece of psychedelia, each piece carefully fitted together in a seemingly effortless manner.
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The Skinny
Whether or not you regard them as tainted by the whiff of gimmickry, it’s worth putting your prejudices to one side here: Oczy Mlody is a damn fine album.
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Audiophile Review
The album is rich with subtle melodies that grow on you amidst big sequenced drum sounds and synthesized string sections.
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Pure Grain Audio
With 12 songs clocking in at just under an hour, the Lips deliver a competent record that their longtime fans will probably enjoy, but it likely won’t recruit the band any new listeners. I imagine this album will be mostly played by hipsters at dinner parties or snippets will be included in smartphone commercials.
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Louder Than War
Balancing lush, psychedelic soundscapes with apocalyptic urgency, Wayne Coyne and co rediscover their Midas touch on album number fourteen. Sam Lambeth just says yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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No More Workhorse
The band are much changed since their earlier low-fi, guitar driven roots and are now a major player, but they seem to be enjoying it. In truth there is something impressive that they continue to try to evolve and move in different directions.
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Backseat Mafia
It's called Oczy Mlody. I think for most(me included), this is a welcome return to a Wayne Coyne, Steve Drozd, and Michael Ivins that want to shed a little sunlight on these dark times.
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Drowned in Sound
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.
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Stack
Ripped straight from the spaced-out dreams of a buzzed brain, The Flaming Lips have returned in a cloudy haze which billows with their classic sound.
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Riff Magazine
The Flaming Lips‘ new extraterrestrial rock opera about the “love generation” and drug-induced sleep, Oczy Mlody, is a surprisingly beautiful ode to nature and troubles that lie ahead.
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DIY Mag
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.
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Irish Examiner
Indie pop’s long-reigning jesters have returned with an album that puts in a nutshell why they are adored and disdained in equal measure.
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RTE
Thankfully, Oczy Mlody actually boasts the kind of cohesion, direction and actual melody that Flaming Lips have sorely lacked for yonks.
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Sound Opinions
Jim says its a sleepy album, filled with electronic glitchiness and Miley Cyrus cameos, but lacking the tunefulness that once made them a great band.
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The Student Newspaper
The specific abstract and metaphorical character of the album’s presentation of life represents a further shortcoming. Whilst this particular technique marked out The Flaming Lips’ releases in the 80s as original, the continuation of this idea several decades later seems less exciting
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The Ithacan
Overall, the album produced by The Flaming Lips is different, serene and adventurous. The group took a risk by drifting from its slow-rock roots to a trippy alternative style, allowing the group to express new emotions.
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The Spectrum
The Flaming Lips mix brilliance with too much weirdness.
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XFDR
This album feels like an offering to Warner Bros. to fulfill a contractual quota. While the standout tracks are provocative, they aren’t legendary, and that’s unfortunately the precedent that The Flaming Lips have set for themselves. However, while this album is lackluster, it is not entirely fruitless.
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Pelican Magazine
Oczy Mlody on the other hand more or less totally does away with guitars, pairing way back on the production to what I would argue to be the overall betterment of the finished product.
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Sun Herald
Nonetheless, the sleep-inducing effect of “Oczly Mlody” grows on you the more you listen to it, and it is a trip through the eyes of youth worth taking again and again.
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Rose And Blog
For Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd, Oczy Mlody is a reach for utopia during a time of dread—and it’s no wonder that 1984 is back as the #1 best seller on Amazon.
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Timotheories
Now they’ve managed to make me appreciate Miley Cyrus as the weird sister I never thought I wanted. Through the eyes of the young we are reborn. A beautiful melody indeed. But that’s just a theory right?
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Vulture Hound
The Flaming Lips have spent decades developing their approach to playful, intelligent and experimental songwriting, which has culminated to produce one of the (very) early contenders for Album of the Year.
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Louisville Cardinal
The album often feels over-produced in psychedelic effects and unable to commit to the new or old, with the old being at least decent, but mostly uninteresting and the new ideas just messily executed.
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Newsday
“Oczy Mlody” is the band’s most cohesive album since the days of “The Soft Bulletin” and seemingly yet another flirtation with a mainstream radio hit. But it also creates dreaminess pegged to a sense of purpose.
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The Irish News
The mix of sounds, variety in tempo and a cameo from Miley Cyrus, The Flaming Lips will have you believing in unicorns as you listen.
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Brooklyn Vegan
Oczy Mlody does have a lot of cool stuff, but from a band who’s set the bar as high as The Flaming Lips have, we’re left wanting more.
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Evening Standard
Oczy Mlody is less sombre and introspective than The Terror (2013), with Stephen Drozd’s slow-tempo soundscapes recalling the more monged moments of the band’s masterpiece, The Soft Bulletin (1998); that pulsating, buzzing drifting-into-the-sun-in-a-malfunctioning-spaceship-but-OK-with-it vibe.
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The Herald
Oczy Mlody merely confirms that the Flaming Lips are to the Noughties and beyond what Gong were to the 1960s and 1970s, namely unashamed space rockers defiantly ploughing their own furrow. But with a better live show.
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Pop Matters
Oczy Mlody fails to to anything notable or interesting, Mlody isn't a bad album: just a forgettable, dismissable one.
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Treble
It’s more of a minor tragedy than anything, because when there are strokes of brilliance, they are so immediately recognizable that you feel that some sort of the spontaneous creativity that adorned their earliest works has managed to seep through, showing the strength of the Lips’ ability to write a masterful and complex track that incorporates their signature sound. Instead, what’s there is hidden behind a wall of seemingly purposeless electronic flair and needless repetition.
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Tenement TV
Oczy Mlody is not an offensively bad album by any measure, but it certainly can irritate or tire the listener with its lack of purpose. The disappointment is heightened by the fact that this is the fourteenth album of a band well-known for being off-kilter and unafraid to change and mix their sounds.
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Off The Tracks
Oczy Mlody features some of the band’s prettiest melodies in a decade and a half, shimmering, shiny pop traces hiding in plain (aural) sight within the gauzy, gaudy textures of their brand of indie-pop meets psychedelic rock.
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Get Some Magazine
The album devolves into a series of sketches for songs that never feel fully finished. As if the Lips just started a recording session and released it unedited.
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Erie Reader
Although at times forgettable, Oczy Mlody is a wonderfully friendly, highly listenable psychedelic record.
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The Arts Desk
Oczy Mlody is so weak it’s a wonder it makes the finishing line. The album’s 58 minutes are taken up with unfocussed songs, fragmentary arrangements, moments of grating novelty and such a lack of sense of purpose, it’s hard to figure out why they bothered.
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Music Feeds
Between the stunning arrangements, psychedelic synths and imaginative songwriting, Oczy Mlody is everything you could hope for from a band you don’t know what to expect from.
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The Bottom Line
It’s by no means revolutionary, but Oczy Mlody remains an endearing collection of more than a few stand-out tracks that still reflect the psychedelic experimentalism that continues to make The Flaming Lips great.
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Dork
‘Oczy Mlody’ is as baffling a Flaming Lips album as you’d expect. It’s more downbeat and reflective, like on the gentle, pastoral psych of ‘How’ and ‘There Should Be Unicorns’. Unfortunately, the pace rarely quickens and the album is short on excitement. It’s not short on ideas, though; the Lips still make music like almost nobody else.
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The Current
Oczy Mlody is a great record if you want to "tune in, turn on and drop out" for a while. Enjoy the trip, I'm sure Wayne Coyne wants you to enjoy your stay.
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Oklahoma Gazette
The Flaming Lips' new Oczy Mlody album brings a dense modern perspective to mythic psychedelia.
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Live for Live Music
The Flaming Lips show on this amazing release that, musically at least, you can go home again, and that when you get there you can do some incredible things with what you learned along the way.
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Technique
The Flaming Lips have reinvented themselves again, and the album with which they have done it may well be the best of their career.
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The Irish Times
Overall, however, it’s hard to imagine this album soundtracking anything other than various states of intoxication.
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7th Level Music
This is already one of the best records of the year. The Flaming Lips can mix dark wave, psychedelia, and electro in ways few bands can. Oczy Mlody ends with laughter. It reminds us to remember joy and have faith. We need that advice in these times.
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Murlough23
Most of the best stuff here is buried pretty deep, and it’s certainly worth finding, but be prepared for a mixed bag if you’re gonna take this record on all in one sitting.
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Beat
Overall Oczy Mlody doesn’t feel as though it goes anywhere or has much to say. While The Flaming Lips’ prime is definitely over they’re still managing to remain mind-boggling and that’s probably all we can hope for them now.
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Crack
As a result, Oczy Mlody presents a reinvigoration. A good Flaming Lips album is all about scale, and while it’s not as boldly experimental as some of their past work (think Yoshimi part 2, rather than Zaireeka), the album still manages to map out worlds within itself.
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The Rumpus
Once again joining forces with Miley Cyrus, the Flaming Lips return to the psychedelic yet melodic sound that marked their beginnings, without leaving their highly experimental approach behind—and have produced one of their best albums thus far.
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The Western Front
As a whole, the album carries on a similar sound and melody through its entirety, with its pulsing synth notes and white noise baseline, making it consistent to listen to. Although it is not a bad album, “Oczy Mlody” pales in comparison to the thirteen records that precede it.
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SMNW
“Oczy Mlody” can best be described as an amorphous blob of electronic and psychedelic music that is not cohesive as an album and has few shining moments that stand out by themselves.
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Plus One Magazine
Album number seventeen, the 12-song Oczy Mlody is a testament to The Flaming Lips’ enduring prowess on the fringes of progressive psych rock, and released some 31 years since their first work, sees Coyne et-al as crackers yet perversely commercial as ever, taking us on yet another glorious psychedelic journey.
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Pressure Life
Oczy Mlody serves as an accomplished distillation of the Flaming Lips diverse catalog.
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