It takes approximately five minutes of the Flaming Lips' Embryonic to realise that you're in the presence of one of those albums: a confounding, caution-to-the-wind act of experimentation and maybe folly, where anything even remotely approaching commercial consideration has gone completely out of the window.
You don't get many of them these days, on the not unreasonable grounds that history tells us they tend to, at best, derail careers – and, at worst, finish them completely.
It has its moments, but in truth, I don't think Embryonic is a great album: if I want to listen to the Flaming Lips, I can't really envision the circumstances in which I'd put it on instead of Clouds Taste Metallic, The Soft Bulletin or Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. And yet, while I occasionally found myself looking at my watch and cursing their self-indulgence, I still can't help being perversely glad it exists. For one thing, better a failed experiment than no experiments at all. And for another, its existence tells you something heartening about the Flaming Lips: that they're not just prepared to trudge on, pleasing the crowds and raking it in; that they think the business of being in a rock band is to challenge their audience and themselves; that they're prepared to fall a bit flat in the process of pursuing that; that there's an appealing bloody-mindedness at their core.
So, in honour of the grand failed experiment, I'm after recommendations of other album-length, career-derailing acts of bloody-minded genius/madness. What are your favourites? Do they work, or is it just the fuck-you spirit you admire? I'd definitely nominate Tricky's Pre-Millennium Tension: an impossibly bleak asthmatic wheeze of an album that effectively called time on his career as a mainstream success, but it repays the listener prepared to wade repeatedly through the sonic murk, slowly revealing moments of transcendent loveliness, not least Makes Me Wanna Die, which may be the best thing he's ever done. Over to you.
