By Scott McLennan

The Claypool Lennon Delirium release a surreal, sharp-edged concept album about empathy, algorithms, and the high cost of efficiency.

The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy, The Claypool Lennon Delirium

With artificial intelligence beginning to squeeze us out of routine tasks like a boa constrictor, and social media shattering good ol’ human connectedness, it looks as if we are peering down the maw of an existential crisis.

Les Claypool and Sean Lennon have concluded that all of these great (and profitable, for billionaires) “advances” are exacting a human cost that we have yet to fully calculate. As a warning, they have produced the wildly wrought, deeply thought-out concept album The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy.

In fact, this is more than just a recording by The Claypool Lennon Delirium. The package includes a comic book drawn by Rich Ragsdale. The project — a double-album song cycle and 24-page comic book — has been designed to challenge the narrative superficiality of 20-second TikTok videos. If you want to appreciate this tale, you need to invest some time and energy. If that is too big an ask—uh oh.

The music and visuals are steeped in absurdist psychedelia, a deliberate rejoinder to the cold, soulless efficiency Claypool and Lennon push back against. The Delirium makes the most of the tension generated between Claypool’s muscular, mammoth bass lines and Lennon’s finely tuned melodic and arranging sensibilities. So, even though the songs are meant to move the story along, the tracks stand on their own. Numbers such as “WAP (What a Predicament),” “The Golden Egg of Empathy,” and “Melody of Entropy” are brilliant prog-pop gems in their own right.

In their satire of capitalism, Claypool and Lennon lay out the “Paperclip Theory,” which posits that a machine instructed to efficiently produce paperclips will ultimately consume all available resources in the pursuit of maximizing production, essentially destroying civilization. It just so happens that the “Parrot-Ox” protagonist, Hippard O. Campus Jr., is the son of the inventor of a great paperclip-making machine that turns their homeland, Cliptopia, into a prosperous community.

Young Hipp wants to be an artist, but his father dismisses that desire as a pointless endeavor. Following a fight with his dad, Hipp leaves his house, stumbles into the Troll Bait Café, and meets Col. O’Coran, the comic book doppelganger of the madcap, carny barker persona Claypool assumes in his live performances.

After pumping plenty of psychoactive soda pop into Hipp, O’Coran convinces him that his father’s clip-making machine is going to doom everyone. This conversation precedes Hipp and the Colonel meeting a manatee with a paperclip stuck in his nose. Hipp helps remove the clip from the manatee’s snout and, in exchange, the peace-loving sea mammal brings the boy and Colonel to his homeland. Sage manatees direct Hipp and O’Coran to the Parrot-Ox, where they will find golden eggs of empathy that have the power to restore humanity to Cliptopia.

You got all that?

Claypool and Lennon’s morality tale is as clever as it is bonkers. The artwork includes a character that resembles an aged and grizzled version of Microsoft’s “Clippy,” an early virtual assistant for computer users. The manatees seem related to the walrus — the original egg man — that Lennon’s father and The Beatles sang about in 1967. Echoes of Pink Floyd and other earlier psychedelic warriors also emanate from the songs. Neil Young searched for a heart of gold; the dehumanizing Cliptron machine contemplates its own cold heart of chrome (“A.I. think, therefore A.I. am”).

Les Claypool and Sean Lennon. Photo: Jay Blakesberg

But none of these pop touchstones strike me as derivative. Instead, the characters and the allegory they’re part of come off as cultural breadcrumbs, strewn along a path that leads us to this particularly alarming point in the long-running battle between artists and technocrats. Lennon rightly quips in the tune “WAP (What a Predicament)” that “I’m not sure if history repeats, but I’m certain that it rhymes.”

The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy is a concept album with the right artistic strategy: you can go deeply into its mythological rendering of the clash between compassionate empathy and steely efficiency; or you can just enjoy most of these songs at their own weirdo face value.

The point is that The Claypool Lennon Delirium lets you—not the almighty algorithm—make the choice.

The Great Parrot-Ox will be landing in Boston on June 10 when the Claypool Gold concert takes place at the Leader Bank Pavilion. The show brings together Claypool’s three bands — Primus, Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, and the Claypool Lennon Delirium — for one helluva multi-catalog-spanning show.

Scott McLennan covered music for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette from 1993 to 2008. He then contributed music reviews and features to The Boston Globe, Providence Journal, Portland Press Herald, and WGBH, as well as to The Arts Fuse. He also operated the NE Metal blog to provide in-depth coverage of the region’s heavy metal scene.