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The Flaming Lips ‘At War With The Mystics’
In the twenty-three years since they took their first tentative steps on the stage of a downtown transvestite bar, Oklahoma’s The Flaming Lips have transformed themselves from a shambolic facsimile of The Butthole Surfers to a band where each new release is viewed as an event.
And rightly so; combining a knack for playful mischievousness with a hallucinogenic rock aesthetic that takes on themes as big as existentialism and metaphysics, The Flaming Lips have discovered the alchemical formula for turning cerebral matters into pop gold.
As with 1999’s ‘The Soft Bulletin’ – the last truly great album of the 20th century – and 2002’s ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’, the subject of death weighs heavily upon ‘At War With The Mystics’. Far from being funereal, the central message of The Flaming Lips’ work has always been, “There’s nothing out there after you’re gone so do something with your life NOW!” The delicious grooves of ‘Mr Ambulance Driver’ belie the subject matter of the endless cycle of life and death (“For everyone that dies/Someone new is born”) and in that respect is a worthy successor to ‘Do You Realise??’ but ‘At War With The Mystics’ frequently turns its attentions to political concerns.
‘The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song’ doesn’t just stop at condemning the abuse of political power as it asks us if we’d fare any better in the job (to which the answer must surely be, “We couldn’t do much worse.”) while ‘Free Radicals’ tackles the fanaticism that drives the zealots on both sides of the so-called War On Terror.
Successfully marrying a more immediate live sound with some incredible sonic experimentation, ‘At The War With The Mystics’ is a more challenging piece than its immediate predecessors. Witness the aforementioned ‘Free Radicals’: a stunning achievement, it captures the sound of Prince driving U2’s ‘Numb’ into a brick wall at the behest of The Neptunes.
Superbly juxtaposed against Wayne Coyne’s cosmic and more earthly musings, ‘At War With The Mystics’ revels in high levels of funk; ‘Haven’t Got A Clue’ and ‘It Overtakes Me’ are such fun that it’s easy to forget that they’re dealing with self-centredness and our individual standing in the endless void that is the universe but for those more comfortable with The Flaming Lips’ proggier explorations, the band makes a Floydian slip with the doomed love of ‘Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung’.
Adventurously daring, humourous and compassionate, ‘At War With The Mystics’ may not offer too many answers but it repeatedly asks all the right questions.
The Flaming Lips ‘At War With The Mystics’ (Warner Bros) Released April 3rd 2006.
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Tagged as The Flaming Lips, archive
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