Who would have guessed this project was going to be super weird? Oh right, every fucking person. Yep, the Flaming Lips/Prefuse 73 EP is a weird one, and not really easy to process. I’m going to enlist a gratuitous analogy to make some sense of this one: Remember old Animal Collective? Like, circa Here Comes the Indian? Backwards, amorphous, avant-fucking-garde. We all know what happened—they eventually become a pop song powerhouse, which nobody could have guessed, within a matter of a few years. This EP is kind of like the electronic version of Here Comes the Indian, only with the Flaming Lips devolving from pop powerhouses of The Soft Bulletin into this much darker, weirder place.

I don’t really feel Guillermo Herron’s (Prefuse 73) presence here. There’s absolutely none of his hip-hop rhythmic flare, and the wacked-out electronics sound like exaggerated elements of the Lips' excellent 2009 Embryonic. Wayne Coyne feels like he's making a cameo, as he pops up for a minute or two on three of the four songs to sing unintelligible verses. On the one song he does emerge from the murkiness, it’s on the deadpanned “Be Like That That,” and it has a tornado siren of a melody, so the weirdness abounds. The ridiculously titled “Superman Made Me Want to Pee” is a fuzzy psyche-freak out, in which the result is as mind-warping as the title. The rest of the EP, most notably “Guillermo’s Bolero,” is droning ambiance. Electronics densely flow in convection, giving a sense of both deliberant placement and alienating randomness.

I’m a red-blooded American indie snob and I like the Lips a lot. I respect Herron, too, but again, I’d never know he was on this album. This EP, though, is really, really inaccessible. I’m not sure the fans of “The Spiderbite Song” are going to be pumping these jams in their car. This monolith of avant-garde droning will leave you cold as fuck, but on the other hand, it’s really fucking sharp. Just listen to the closer, “Guillermo’s Bolero,” a beautiful surrealist galactic adventure. Maybe you have to prepare yourself for it, maybe it takes a certain mindset, but it’s a goddamn piece of art. This isn’t an EP for everyone, but for all of its psychedelic disorienting, it’s both intricate and engaging.

1. Superman Made Me Want to Pee
2. Heavy Star Movin’
3. Be Like That That
4. Guillermo’s Bolero