In the summer of 2002, The Flaming Lips, those psych-rocking Oklahomaniacs turned symphony-taming rabbit-suited sonic boomers, released Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Immaculate, incandescent and inspiring, it was the most consistently engaging, compulsively listenable album yet from America's most ambitious, most versatile and arguably greatest rock 'n' roll band.
Four years, 10,000 pounds of confetti and at least a million shattered eardrums later, the Lips hunkered down in the studio to craft At War With the Mystics. For almost any other band, the glistening Mystics would be a career milestone. But held up next to the warped genius of virtually everything The Flaming Lips have ever touched, At War With the Mystics is a disheartening disappointment.
Though The Flaming Lips had been progressively purifying the slovenly psychoactivity of their earliest recordings for years, it was 1999's triumphant The Soft Bulletin that finally broke them of all their old buzzed-out habits, replacing them with the slick, synth-heavy sound they eventually perfected on Yoshimi. Great as they'd been before, the singular, euphoric noise The Flaming Lips were now sticking behind their songs propelled them into a new stratosphere.
But after two stunning, similar-sounding epics, Mystics finds our Lips unsure of how to top themselves and apparently unwilling to try. They're still experts of the ear-pleasing detail, and still capable of making Wayne Coyne's potentially crippling lyrical earnestness somehow endearing. Yet, At War With the Mystics plays it too safe, breaks out too many of its predecessors' now-yellowing tricks without adding any new ones to their repertoire and rouses none of the passion and awe of the band's past classics.
At War With the Mystics is, to its credit, a political album, with frequent lyrical jabs at the strong-arm tactics of the Bush administration. But Coyne's over-general, non-prescriptive words of condemnation render themselves impotent. The brainless sunstroke epiphanies of Yoshimi's "Do You Realize??" might have been more Cookie Monster than Kierkegaard, but at least they were sort of cute. Coyne's bland Mystics statements can't even support themselves past the soapbox.
The big letdown of At War With the Mystics isn't the words, it's the tunes. Save the solid ecstasy of "The W.A.N.D." and a handful of fleeting moments elsewhere, Mystics packs precious little of the inventive punch at the heart of the Lips' oeuvre, those thrilling turnabouts only they could pull off. Add to that the logy, diffident '70s AM radio vibe of a lot of these tracks, and what you've got is an album that intends to intrigue but bores instead.
At times, At War With the Mystics is just like the giant balloon Wayne floated in over European festival crowds during the post-Yoshimi tour -- an eye-popping distraction full of promise and a whole lot of empty air. Mystics' immaculate conception can't hide the fact that it's low on both ideas and energy, more method behind less madness than anything they've done before. I firmly believe that the Lips will rise again and that Mystics is merely a hiccup in an otherwise magisterial career. I just hope I don't have to wait four more years to be proven right. Grade: C-
