Finally, the punk rockers are taking acid… again! Well, maybe the Flaming Lips are an impossibly successful major label pop band who don’t even do drugs anymore, but on their 12th album Embryonic they sure as hell sound like they’re tripping on some anti-establishment inspiration. While the Lips’ last two records pushed radio pop to stratospheric extremes, Embryonic inverts the process and attempts to make pop sense out of absolute weirdness for a double-album’s-worth 18 tracks. The result is far closer to their four-disc participatory-listening experiment Zaireeka (minus the inconvenience) than anything before or since. Gone are the glorious strings of The Soft Bulletin and the glitchy space rock of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots; instead, there are screeching voices and pulsing bass lines (“Silver Trembling Hands”), dubby psychedelia (“The Sparrow Looks up at the Machine”) and even some guest spots from MGMT (whose debut was produced by Lips’ long-time sonic architect Dave Fridmann) and Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O’s animal noises on “I Can Be a Frog” (don’t ask). By balancing “proper” songs with tangential interludes, the Lips take full advantage of both the inspired madness of bandleader Wayne Coyne and the inspired genius of multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd. Consequently, “Scorpio Sword” and the Morricone-esque “Aquarious Sabotage” come off like scores for imaginary films (or Christmas on Mars sequels) while sliding seamlessly into the album’s shambolic beauty. Embryonic, as its name suggests, is far from perfect — in the car commercial soundtrack sense of the word, at least — but celebrating the glory of imperfection has always been what The Flaming Lips do best.