Rating:   6 Ratings     12345  

The Flaming Lips At War With the Mystics Warner Bros / Wea

      Forget all the lukewarm or downright chilly reviews you’ve read of At War With the Mystics, four years later the Flaming Lips still have it and you are going to love this album.

      You’ll know it as soon as it starts. At War With the Mystics opens with one of the Lips’ best tracks to date. “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” thumps and shakes and rolls and screams and fires off in a million weird directions like fireworks, all the while being as catchy and blissful and insane as anything Oklahoma’s leading psychedelians have ever produced.

      And what’s more, this great track doesn’t dwarf the rest of the songs on the album. They have plenty to offer of their own. “The W.A.N.D.” is a great big fuzzy guitar riff rocker, “It Overtakes Me” is rollicking, frolicking fun, and “Goin’ On” closes the album with a cozy Neil Young influenced ballad. Sure, there are a lot of old tricks here – plenty of the synths, beeps and echoes are familiar from The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi – but the Lips continue to experiment and break new ground. At War With the Mystics is the joyful sound of a band still having fun playing around with buttons and knobs: guitars and vocals are pitch-shifted left and right, drums go backward and stop and lurch forward again, birds sing.

      Lyrically, the album provides plenty of the hopeful existentialism Coyne and his crew have come to be known for. You only have to look at track titles like “The Sound Of Failure / It’s Dark . . . Is It Always This Dark??” or “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion (The Inner Life As Blazing Shield Of Defiance And Optimism As Celestial Spear Of Action)” to see that. And the gentle suggestion that those evil Mystics from the title are meant to represent the Modern American Neo-Conservatives gives the album’s concept a bit more focus than its predecessors. Yet, along with the near-literary heights achieved, there are also some slip ups. There are a few times when the lyrics are stripped down to the bare, repetitive essentials and leave you with choruses like the one in “Free Radicals”. Coyne singing “You think you’re radical / But you’re not so radical / In fact you’re fanatical” is almost farcical in its simplicity, and I’m afraid it’s hard to tell whether the Flaming Lips are in on the joke.

      The shortcomings of the album, however, limited to the occasional questionable lyric and an over reliance on instrumental interludes, are far outweighed by its accomplishments. It may not be The Soft Bulletin, but how many albums are? At War With the Mystics stands on its own as an exciting and wonderful work, destined for a spot on your top ten list at the end of the year. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Flaming Lips have done it again.

-Adam Bunch 04/11/06