Product Description

'At War With The Mystics' is the twelfth studio album from The Flaming Lips. Produced once again by Dave Fridmann at his Tarbox Studios, the album sees Coyne and Co. move away from the digital sounds that dominated their 2002 release 'Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots' and take on a more experimentalorganic sound described by leader Coyne as "space-age jazz and progressive Dixieland". The album also includes the singles 'The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song' and 'The WAND'.

Track Listing

1. The YeahYeahYeah Song...(With All Your Power)
2. Free Radicals (A Hallucination Of The Christmas Skeleton Pleading With A Suicide Bomber)
3. The Sound Of Failure / It's Dark...Is It Always This Dark??
4. My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion (The Inner Life As Blazing Shield Of Defiance And Optimism As Celestial Spear Of Action)
5. Vein Of Stars
6. The Wizard Turns On...The Giant Silver Flashlight And Puts On His Werewolf Moccasins
7. It Overtakes Me / The Stars Are So Big...I Am So Small...Do I Stand A Chance?
8. Mr. Ambulance Driver
9. Haven't Got A Clue
10. The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat)
11. Pompeii am Götterdämmerung
12. Goin' On

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3301 in Music
• Released on: 2006-04-03
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Following on from their sprawling and excellent Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the Flaming Lips seem to have lightened up the mood with their new long-player At War With The Mystics. Despite the overtly political ‘anti-Bush’ stance that runs through the album’s lyrics, it’s the music – upbeat, accessible - that will attract and startle Lip’s fans most. Opening track, "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" is a fine example of the bands newly palatable schtick. It’s an undeniably inventive song in terms of arrangements and mood but it lacks the band’s signature excess, and opens the floodgates for a stream of similarly superficial songs that favour feelgood atmospherics over anything truly transcendental. It’s not that the songs are bad; most of them are very, very good. But the Prince-like funk soundtrack that backs "Free Radicals", for example, is a far cry from prior material like "Chrome Plated Suicide" etc., which made their reputation as a band to be reckoned with. Some may love this new pop-lite direction, but just as many may well find it disappointing. --Paul Sullivan

Customer Reviews

Pleasing, but not thrilling
As someone who loved The Soft Bulletin but failed to be entirely seduced by Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, I approached this album with cautious interest. The Flaming Lips are a band blessed with obvious eccentric talent, but often do not channel it in the most effective way... well, this time they certainly did. This is a consistently good album and probably their most complete piece of work to date. There are fantastic album tracks such as The Sounds Of Failure and My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion and moments of pure pop joy like It Overtakes Me which would have been show-stoppers on their last two albums, but they instead feel like texturally-rich, thoroughly enjoyable, well-crafted pieces of a rather splendid and colourful jigsaw.

It falls short of being dubbed a masterpiece, however, because of a few pedestrian tracks which the album could probably have lived without, such as Mr. Ambulance Driver and Haven't Got A Clue, giving At War With The Mystics an unfortunate mid-album lull. The album finishes strongly with the bizarrely titled Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung and Goin' On - one of the most straight forward songs The Flaming Lips have ever released and, stripped of all their bombast and electronic backdrop, they sound very pleasant indeed. For me this is one of the surprise packages of the year - a consistent Flaming Lips album which generally only pleases and doesn't particularly frustrate.

Let It Wash Over You
As a complete album, I actually think that this is The Flaming Lips' best. Yes, some of the lyrics may be abysmal, the "yeah, yeah, yeah" of "The Yeah, Yeah, Yeah Song" fame does become plain irritating after a couple of listens, and The Lips on politics may well provide you with about as much depth as an ashtray does. The fact remains, though, that this is a sonic masterpiece - don't listen to hear this album, listen to absorb it.

It is a psychadelic rock album from start to finish - the album's name, the artwork, the song names (e.g. "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion - The Inner Life As Blazing Shield Of Defiance And Optimism As Celestial Spear Of Action"), twelve songs that take 55 minutes to listen to, the many references to cosmology and mysticism, and the lush, multi-layerd music.

My favourite song is the Pink Floyd-inspired "Pompeii am Götterdämmerung". Melodically, it is beautiful. Please just listen to it. The song itself (sung by Drozd) is about two lovers about to die from the volcano eruption that destroys Pompeii, but who recognise that their bodies will remain together, preserved for all time. The Götterdämmerung of the song title is a Wagnerian opera based on a Norse myth regarding a foretold war of the Gods that brings about the end of the world - a far more subtle reference to the political overtones of this album then the sledgehammer used elsewhere.

An even more poignant song is "The Sound of Failure" - a song that challenges the culture of remaining cheerful and hopeful in the face of life's darker moments, including for Coyne, the death of his mother during the recording of the album. In other words, that it is okay to be thoughful and to reflect on life's more bleaker aspects:

So go tell Britney and go tell Gwen/
She's not tryin' to go against all them/
'Cause she's too scared and she can't pretend/
To understand where it begins or ends/
Or what it means to be dead.

The song itself is reminiscint of "The Soft Bulletin"'s finer offerings - a slow tempo, softly-sung lyrics, and emotionally moving.

Politically-motivated songs, on the other hand, are are not normally associated with The Flaming Lips. However. on this album, they open with two of them. The first is "The Yeah, Yeah, Yeah Song", a song that challenges people to say what they would do differently in a similar position. It is a genuinely good song, save for the ceaseless repetition of "yeah, yeah, yeah", and asks a question many never of ask of themselves when they criticise others. "Free Radicals" though is a song that would be utterly forgetable if it was not for the fact that it sounds like Prince at his regal best. It is so catchy that I defy anyone not to catch themselves singing those terrible lyrics afterwards!

Later in the album, the political theme returns on "Haven't Got a Clue" with what appears like a direct assault on the presidency of George Bush. However, while Coyne's frustration may be genuine, the softly sung, but knuckle-dragging refrain of "every time you state your case, the more I want to punch your face" just sounds puerile and lacks credibility. At least Coyne acknowledges such limitations in an interview with "The Independent" newspaper:

"We would never make protest music, and I don't necessarily think that music can change the world. I mean, it's wonderful but music is just music. But the idea of ignoring Bush and this war is ridiculous too. It's like when you're so mad, you punch the wall. Obviously it doesn't do you any good, but if you don't punch the wall, you feel even worse."

The last such song (and the album's first single) is "The W.A.N.D.", a mystical song about taking on such political masters with a magic wand...

The album ends with "Goin' On". It is another of The Lips' slow-tempo, poignant pieces that brings a dignified ending to a sonic roller-coaster of an album.

I tried, I mean I really tried...
... but the sad fact is that it's not up to scratch.

Bands have their ups and downs, but the FLs have produced gem after gem. Until now. Fans of their earlier, harder stuff might have found 'Soft Bulletin' and 'Yoshimi' a little flimsy, but there was no denying the craftsmanship and the originality of those albums. The desire to play and surprise is still here but on far too many songs there's just nothing substantial, nothing to stick in the mind.

There's a few great tracks, as others have pointed out, and for those songs I'll give it 3 stars, but too many songs sound like the Flaming Lips playing at being the Flaming Lips, iyswim. Right down to the mad song titles. Sad.

Let's hope it's just a blip. For all the brilliance of their other work and the joy it's given me, I can forgive them this one slip-up. But no more lads, please!