Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 4/5 Released: April 4, 2006 Reviewer: Nathan Atnikov |
Imagine you are Flaming Lips leader Wayne Coyne. Four years ago, you released Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, a hallucinatory mind-fuck about robots, mortality, humanization, and Asians. At times strikingly brilliant, and at times inaccessible, there have been few albums like it before or since. So how do you follow up such an anomaly? Apparently, you record a pop album.
Of course, pop is in the eye of the beholder, and Coyne takes anything but a conventional approach to this kind of music. Most of At War With The Mystics is a logical succession to Yoshimi‘s ‘Fight Test,’ the most musically upbeat of the previous album’s tracks. Lyrically, the album revels in the more immediate, as on opener ‘The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,’ a moralizing sound-off on just how much power it would take to corrupt you. Coyne’s stream of consciousness is still difficult to follow; on ‘Free Radicals,’ he imagines trying to reason with a suicide bomber, and then scrutinizes the fake optimism of Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani on ‘The Sound of Failure.’
Mystics may be more accessible than Yoshimi, but in no way does that mean it’s less of an art project. The Lips effortlessly create sprawling landscapes with the simplest ideas, all helped by the fact that Coyne’s vocals are as sharp and clear as ever. His meditations on modern life are all over the map, but it’s worth it just for the journey.
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