This is a really frustrating release for me. Right up to this record, I had seen the Oklahoma acid menagerie improve, in some form or another, with each successive release. This culminated with 2002's Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, which was their most handsome critical and commercial success – and, on a side note, changed the course of my life (if it wasn't for YBTPR, I wouldn't be writing music reviews today). I still hold it to be one of the most human records ever released, up there with John Lennon's Imagine. But the strongest feeling I get from At War With The Mystics is that it's a wank-riddled parody amalgam of The Flaming Lips back catalogue, focusing on the earlier stuff.
At War begins on a sadly comedic note with the annoying "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" and the fucking Scissor Sisters-like "Free Radicals." Right off the bat, you know something stylistically drastic has taken place. While they maintain some of the bizarre studio effects of their latter-day output, the Lips have made an inexplicable conscious effort to return to their mid-'90s freak folk guitar fuzz and unignorable '80s tweak vocal overdubs roots. Simultaneously, off the back of live covers like Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," they've rediscovered their record collection and remembered their classic rock influences (Peter Frampton's talk box makes several appearances). Paired with a new vocal appreciation for those jive talkin' Gibb brothers, the effect is often something of a clammy dream set where Studio 54 nightmares end and pre-Clinton administration acid flashbacks begin. Basically, everything you liked about the last two LPs is dead as disco. Just forget that Flaming Lips.
The new Lips are worthy of credit for a few reasons, though. Lyrically, Wayne Coyne has never been quite so politically and culturally relevant. His stated goals here are to bring down King Bush The Second (natch), gluttonous consumerism, and the perpetuators of such horrific social practices, like Gwen Stefani, Destiny's Child, and Black Eyed Peas (if you read my reviews, these are also favourite targets of mine). With these lyrics and passions, "The Sound Of Failure" achieves a '70s FM radio sheen that makes me think if I had heard this album ten years ago, I would've loved it. If more of At War were like the falsetto-less Yes meets Jethro Tull instrumental jam "The Wizard Turns On," I'd probably wholeheartedly endorse this record now. As such, if you can ignore the two irksome opening tracks and the Chipmunk-voiced first half of "It Overtakes Me" (as cool as that song's incorporation of the phrase "wake and bake" is), this could be one of the better Flaming Lips albums... but that's one torturous hell of an "if." This is their eleventh album, though. Every great band gets a Magical Mystery Tour eventually. Like Wayne Campbell said, "Led Zeppelin didn't write tunes everyone liked. They left that to the Bee Gees."
1. The Yeah Yeah Yeah 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 & Optimism As Celestial Spear Of Action)
5. Vein Of Stars
6. The Wizard Turns On...The Giant Silver Flashlight & 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