Their not inconsiderable presence stems from the beauty of their, yes, Cosmic American Music.
More than any polemic, The Flaming Lips encourage resistance through rapture. On “Haven’t Got A Clue” (“Every time you state your case/The more I want to punch your face”) the subject of Coyne’s surreal vitriol is probably Dubya, although saying At War With The Mystics is about Iraq is like describing Sgt Pepper’s as anti-Vietnam. “The W.A.N.D.” (a recent internet-only single), including the cry, “We got the power now, motherfuckers!”, is hi-tech grunge, like Sabbath produced by Pharrell. “Free Radicals”, a dig at fundamentalists and Donald Trump, pivots around a daft Coyne falsetto and Michael Ivins’ cosmic slop of a bassline: this is funk as envisioned by Frank Zappa and Hanna Barbera.Īfter the last two albums’ titular obsession with conflict, on this loose concept the Lips assault Bush and his bombing cronies.
The music is dense with detail: there’s an air of abundance here as Fridmann and Co fill every space with sci-fi sounds and micro-melodies, speaker-panning whooshes and digital splutters. The first single, it’s going to be a pan-generational smash, in spite or because of the dumb know-thyself lyric and call-and-response chorus. “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song”, the opener, is acid bubblegum that subverts as it affirms. Recorded throughout 2005 with Dave Fridmann at the controls, the swooning/shocking duality of the Lips’ concerts, the pink bunnies and gore-fetishism, is once more reflected in the music, which veers from shattering FX to celestial sonics just as the lyrics jerk between metaphysical despair and juvenile glee. At War With The Mystics is another extraordinary collection from this late-peaking band. Then again, from a group who more convincingly than any other convey wonder and joy – and with a Disneyish flourish, no less – a happy ending was inevitable. Either way, a third classic album was looking unlikely. Worse, some implied, was that Drozd’s genius was fuelled by smack, and if he did clean up, he’d lose his touch. Narcotic oblivion had destroyed his sense of purpose. That scene in the Fearless Freaks DVD in which multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd prepared to shoot up showed what a dead end he, and the band, could find themselves down. Seduced by success, The Flaming Lips would, it seemed, spend their dotage pandering to young crowds as rock’s token mad uncles. There was talk from frontman Wayne Coyne of a return to raw power and doing-it-live, of a retreat from studio artifice towards a more organic and conventional rock attack that could be recreated on the world’s stages. Besides, when you’ve created two records so monumental in terms of production and lyrical content, what do you do for an encore?Īdvance word on At War With The Mystics sent alarm bells ringing. It was their second consecutive brilliant state of the universe address on mortality and dread, transience and transcendence, but surely now, with a million sales and celebrity fans from Jack White to Juliette Lewis, overexposure and their new media friendliness would rob them of their edge. After this, one suspected, being embraced by a large audience following 15 years on the margins as a cult horrorshow with just the Butthole Surfers for company would cause a loss of nerve.Īnd yet, miraculously, they did it again in 2002 with Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, another record magnificently poised between gorgeous melody and garish electro-noise, between their old life on the fringes and their new status as the mainstream’s weirdo cause celebre. The acclaim it won in the critics’ polls and for their live forays in 2000 gave further credence to the idea that this was as far as the Lips, if not rock per se, could go. There was something so ultimate about The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, emphasised by its release in the last year of the 20th Century, you expected it to close with this paraphrase of Jean-Luc Godard: “End – End of Music.” Although its predecessor, 1997’s quadrophrenic experiment Zaireeka, proposed new directions, TSB was the culmination a compression of pop’s best ideas into 12 mini-epics of nuance and bombast.
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