The Flaming Lips: At War with the Mystics

Every time a new album is released by the Flaming Lips it usually takes about ten seconds for the listening to say, "Yep, this is a Flaming Lips album." For a band that was once one of the many one hit wonders in the mid-90's alternative music scene, they've evolved into one of the bands whose new album release date is circled on the calendar.

At War with the Mystics, is their first album in four years and if you haven't listened to their past few efforts in a while Mystics will seem like a bucket of cold water in the face.

The album opens with two tracks that are extremely disorienting. "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" and "Free Radicals" both disregard time signatures frequently making you feel like you've been cut loose of the grooves of the song like a man overboard from a ship, only to be reeled back in violently to catchy melodies.

The rest of the album settles into a more standard Flaming Lips sounding album, as if there's anything standard about that. While 2002's "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" sounded like a science fiction album released in 2002, Mystics sounds like a science fiction album released in 1976.

At first listen it would be easy to say that on Mystics the Flaming Lips have fallen head long into Yes-era progressive rock hell, but that's not the case. I think a more accurate description would be Pink Floyd with less paranoia.

One of the standout things about Mystics is Wayne Coyne's vocals. At first it's hard to tell that he's actually the one doing the singing. He's not as over the top as he was on "Yoshimi." He's certainly not as playful. The last song we heard from The Flaming Lips was a song on the SpongeBob SquarePants soundtrack. Coyne played the song on Late Night with Conan O'Brien inside a plastic bubble. It's hard to imagine any track on this album being playful enough to bring out stunts like that. It's a moody and dense piece.

The strongest section of the album is the five song stretch between "The Wizard Turns On…" to "The W.A.N.D." "The Wizard" is an instrumental that could have come straight from Pink Floyd. The next three tracks are the highlights of the more subdued aspects of "Mystics." "The W.A.N.D." is the first single and only track that brings back the over-the-top atmosphere of "Yoshimi." The results of the two opening tracks and this stretch of five are that the band has made an album that works as a single piece of music called "At War with the Mystics" and as individual tracks.

It's something they've always been good at.
What's unique about the standout tracks on "Mystics" is that the most experimental tracks are the ones that are the most likeable. "Yoshimi" had standout songs that were fairly straightforward radio singles and the experimental ones were maybe too experimental for standard consumption. It's the exact opposite here. Instrumentals, merged, and disjointed tracks are the ones that make "Mystics" a great album.

"At War with the Mystics" is unlike anything I've heard since, well, "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots." With albums like this that are so dense its difficult to tell how good it is right away. You hear new things every time you play it. I'm going to have to go back and listen to "Yoshimi" again for the sole purpose that this album has whet my appetite for this kind of experimental music.

After years of hearing nothing but introspective indie rock it's refreshing to hear this kind of bizarre creativity. The best review I can immediately give is to say I "think" it's a great album. I'm not entirely sure. In a few years I may be willing to say its one of the best albums of the decade, but right now there's a lot of stuff still in there that needs to be rung out.