Reviewed by Mike Katzif :: 16 March 2006




For over twenty years, the off-kilter music of Oklahoma City rock vetrans, the Flaming Lips have built a reputation amongst fans and critics for their nonsensical lyrics and experimentally strange live performances. Their most recent album, At War With the Mystics reinvents the band's sound again while still managing to sound like themselves. Mike Katzif has this review.

The first song on the much anticipated new album At War With the Mystics grabs you immediately. With its humourous vocal introduction and an excess of keyboards, distorted electric guitars, and singer Wayne Coyne's signature cracking falsetto, 'Yeah Yeah Yeah Song', serves as a good indication of the the Lips' latest direction.

Over the years, Coyne has helmed the Flaming Lips through an overabundant collage of absurdist art rock albums, 90210 appearances, and Spongebob soundtracks. Yet its the Lips' experimental live shows that have grown famous for their audio-visual sensory overload of music, video, brightly coloured light shows, confetti machines and an uncomfortable amount of furry animal costumes.

This album in particular captures The Flaming Lips' live spirit. It sounds like they play much of the music live in the studio, giving the songs a sense of immediacy and spontaneity. They fill out the sound by combining dense instrumental layers and sentimental melodies. The mellow sci-fi folk song, 'Vein of Stars' exposes Coyne's fragile voice on a bed of epicly warm string arrangements which renders it both approachable and characteristically, a little bizarre.

At its core, At War with the Mystics is a natural extention of where pevious albums left off, though not attempting to be a sequal to 2003's Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Absent are the dystopic concept album story arcs and synthbeat-laden computer-blips of the Yoshimi era. And while it aschews this for catchy repeated lyrical phrasings and reverbed wah wah guitar, the songs flow seamlessly forming a mood driven songcycle.

It is simultaneously melancholy and funny, emotionally raw and atmospherically lush. While it is hard to know initially how this record will be viewed long term in relation to the gems of the Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi, the Lips maintain their trajectory of constant reimagination while ultimately sounding like themselves.