The Flaming Lips built themselves a mountain. For me, they started the building with Transmissions from the Satellite Heart (and its accompanying odd-man-out hit “She Don’t Use Jelly”) and its follow-up Clouds Taste Metallic; but they added an enormous amount of solid ground when they released The Soft Bulletin. They even managed to come quite close to topping that monumental album when they released its follow-up Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. They gave themselves an enormous challenge. How can you follow two phenomenal albums? It won’t be easy.
And it’s not. At War with the Mystics is a good album. I don’t think the Lips are capable of making a “bad” album. It’s just that Mystics simply doesn’t have the gravity of The Soft Bulletin or the melody of Yoshimi. The first time I heard Mystics, I was inevitably let down as it didn’t measure up. It wasn’t fair to them though. I don’t think either of their previous two albums were easily digested on their first listens either.
The opening salvo from Mystics is catchy. Upon first listen you’ll probably think “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” is a little too unconventional or even annoying to ever be a good song, much like the rest of the album. It will sink in when you realize that the song is stuck in your head, notably it’s “yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah” choruses and “no no no no no no” choruses. I was skeptical when I first heard the song as a single. Now I like the song a lot.
The song segues into singer and ringleader Wayne Coyne’s most Prince-inspired number yet “Free Radicals”, but it’s Prince filtered through the surreal a la Flaming Lips. “The Sound of Failure” takes us back into more familiar Lips territory as the song feels like a contemporary of Yoshimi, with it’s melodic chorus featuring a pronounced distorted guitar, twirls of what-sounds-like electronic flutes and a bouncy bass-line. Actually, that same distorted guitar is the most notable addition to the Lips sound on this album. “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion” could have been on The Soft Bulletin except that it features the same raw guitar sound that would’ve stuck out sorely on Bulletin.
There are also a lot of bells and whistles (and sirens) on this album. “It Overtakes Me” is a seven-plus minute long song of three very distinct chapters and it starts with a falling siren sound. The first half sounds very much like early popular-era Lips, circa Transmissions or Clouds but the second third changes gears so drastically, it’s hard to place the song as the driving bass line drops out and it becomes a drawn-out harmony of voices and digitized instruments. This subsequently morphs into a beautiful acoustic guitar picking…
Which segues into the next song that literally starts with a siren – an ambulance siren. “Mr. Ambulance Man” is one of their most accessible songs on the album and it is deservedly so, as the song is beautifully composed and the mixing is perfect. Even the ambulance siren doesn’t sound out of place. The production of the album is evident and many others will claim the album is “over-produced”, a term I’m hesitant to apply to most albums, regardless of whether or not their production is transparent or not. This album has obvious production values and tweaks and bells and whistles (and sirens), but it does not detract from the experience.
All this being said, At War with the Mystics still doesn’t quite hold up to its predecessors. A lot of it sounds like a retake of older Lips’ styles. The Lips are easily the most experimental band around today and they deserve to be commended for that. I also don’t want to scare away people from this album as it takes awhile to get into, but it is nevertheless a solid album.
What the Lips have to offer is something more than most other popular bands can today: solid song-writing and an idiosyncratic appeal. Like I say about modern cinema (“Even the crappiest Martin Scorsese film is better than the best ‘Hollywood’ blockbuster”), the same goes for music – in this case I’d say, “even the crappiest Flaming Lips album is better than the best NOW album... Of course, I've yet to even hear a "crappy" Lips album!
GRADE: B