There's a moment in last year's documentary, The Fearless Freaks, where Wayne Coyne is playing a song he was writing during the time of the Clouds Taste Metallic sessions. With only his strumming to accompany him, Wayne sings, "Cats killing dogs, pigs eating rats..." The song is "Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus With Needles", and on its way to actualization, it will acquire a weird intro and a stranger instrumental bridge, and will be puffed up large and colorful enough to suit the rest of that big, glowing album. But even as Coyne plays it alone on guitar, you can hear something special.
Listening to At War With the Mystics-- the Flaming Lips' first new album in almost four years, and the product of many months in the studio-- it's difficult to imagine a similarly inspiring glimpse into one of these songs' construction. Much of the record sounds like chords and melodies were written later, as an afterthought to flesh out production experiments. The goofy noises, glitches, and wafts of Wilsonian harmony in "Haven't Got a Clue", for example, seem to be more central to the track's focus than the melody (of which there is almost none) or the lyrics ("Every time you state your case/ The more I want to punch your face"). But the sounds are certainly interesting.
At War With the Mystics has already been discussed as the band's Return to Rock or Return to the Weird, but I don't really hear those things. Some of this talk arose because among the first of these tracks to emerge was "The W.A.N.D.", a good song built on a gnarly guitar riff-- a combo we haven't heard from these guys for some time. It doesn't approach the force of, say, "Slow Nerve Action", but this is the best guitar rock they've produced since Clouds Taste Metallic. Still, it's not indicative of the record as a whole.
Instead, At War With the Mystics is a grab bag of musical styles, without ever seeming like a retread of any particular album or sound they've explored during the course of their 20-year career. Though the themes are cut from the same cloth as the last few records-- meditations on fear, death, love, one's place in the universe, and so on-- musically, the band is up for experimenting. The production is distant, queasy, fuzzier, and less direct than any of their recent outings; the vocals are often manipulated and toyed with-- Coyne goes from singing in a register so low you can hardly recognize him (the single "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song") to one so high that he sounds like Beck doing Prince ("Free Radicals"). Musical mastermind Steven Drozd even sings his first lead, on "Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung", one of the record's better songs, a peculiar amalgamation of several strands of krautrock and Pink Floyd's "One of These Days".
While the band has always played around with a variety of sounds, when you get down to the nuts and bolts of songwriting, most of Mystics doesn't measure up. It's telling that their best melody since The Soft Bulletin was written by Cat Stevens, and when the Lips make more traditional song compositions their focus, the results here are rarely engaging. At War With the Mystics leaves me wondering whether making good records is really the point for the Flaming Lips at this juncture. With this album, I'm struck by the possibility that the Flaming Lips are an idea and a project as much of a band, and records are just one of the organization's many concerns. This doesn't seem like any great tragedy, and I've no question that many tens of thousands more people will get into them this year for the first time and find their lives enriched by what the Flaming Lips have to offer. But for the first time in more than 15 years they've made an album that is difficult to consider great, regardless of how it's approached.
