Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 03/04/06
Label: Warner

Consolidating the achievements of their magnificent 1999 album "The Soft Bulletin", 2002's "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots" landed The Flaming Lips with the role of dad-mag favourite. Their eccentric experimental vein, but always intoxicating pop nouse, proving credible but welcoming to all comers. The opportunity to locate a public headspace in which beatific psyche-prog somehow charms its way into a pop universal would now seem to be on the table. But seldom has this 13-year-old band taken a straight path down their bizarre yellow brick road.

After playing covers of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" and The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" in live sets, things have been amped up a bit. But metal, garage rock or any other genre shot through the kaleidoscopic filter of The Flaming Lips can't be expected to come out with genre conventions intact. Instead, where "At War With The Mystics" varies most wildly from previous albums is in the Lips-ification of these new challenges. After all this time, their musical language is so strong it imposes itself effortlessly on everything they touch.

"The W.A.N.D." and "Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung" push past the symphonic pop that threatened to etch their epitaph to discover another thrilling twist, where Led Zeppelin, ELO and Pink Floyd are all absorbed but never overly apparent. "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" and "Free Radicals" rejoice in bubblegum pop politicking with Wayne Coyne proving a disarmingly naïve commentator on the wrongs of the new world order.

Elsewhere there are plenty of the trademarked pop-symphonic reveries: "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion" simplifies the existential themes of "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" but shares its blissful ego-free tumble through sound. "The Sound Of Failure" revisits the perfect pop of "She Don't Use Jelly" but "Haven't Got A Clue" and "Mr. Ambulance Driver" - whilst providing a little calm before the album's impressive closing trio - effectively tread water.

If Coyne's voice is little surer than ever, the same isn't true of the band's songs, which have a fluency suggesting an act at the peak of their powers. Totally impervious to fashion, they combine high and low with such mercurial flare that they can convincingly close on something resembling a 10cc tribute yet remain as profound as "Surf's Up" era Beach Boys. Very close to the pop universal indeed, "At War With The Mystics" is The Flaming Lips' most effortless and varied exploration of their charming and profound tongue to date.

    by James Poletti