Nostalgia tripping at the gates of Hell.

The Flam­ing Lips — At War with the Mystics

The Flam­ing Lips’ At War with the Mys­tics tells a pes­simistic polit­i­cal sto­ry. Begin­ning with the unfor­tu­nate­ly titled “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song”, they ques­tion human nature and assume the worst: that baser ele­ments win out in the sec­u­lar cos­mol­o­gy and that our impuls­es are inher­ent­ly self-inter­est­ed, a cease­less cho­rus of annoy­ing yeahs seems to sig­nal acqui­es­cence. If that’s true, it’s a damn­ing indict­ment com­ing from a band hereto­fore so pre­oc­cu­pied with hal­lu­cino­gens that pol­i­tics seemed but a pass­ing con­cern. So has Wayne Coyne’s pro­tec­tive bub­ble sud­den­ly burst and let in the awful world, the one where the oth­er half lives?

Now it seems that these once avowed escapists are tak­ing a stand, even if it’s already too late. Dis­pleased with lim­ou­sine lib­er­al­ism and its adher­ents, “Free Radicals” serves an unsym­pa­thet­ic ser­mon, cru­sad­ing against casu­al crit­ics of neo-con­ser­v­a­tivism and fun­da­men­tal­ism while “The Sound of Failure” takes con­spic­u­ous con­sumers to task, hop­ing to find a pur­er and more con­tro­ver­sial alter­na­tive to pop divas like Gwen Ste­fani and Brit­ney Spears. But by tak­ing aim at such tar­gets, At War with the Mys­tics reach­es didac­tic con­clu­sions through self-fla­gel­la­tion. By com­mit­ting a Trot­skyite ges­ture in bad faith, they dis­miss their would-be allies instead of ral­ly­ing them to con­front the mys­ti­cal invo­ca­tions of free trade, xeno­pho­bia and reli­gious per­ver­sions that fuel today’s super­mar­ket brand fascism.

Musi­cal­ly, The Flam­ing Lips go nos­tal­gia trip­ping at the gates of hell. By giv­ing up the furi­ous depths of their mag­num opus­es, the album sounds at times like Peter Framp­ton Bat­tles the Pink Robots; a most­ly bland rehash­ing of sev­en­ties A.M. sounds and sen­si­bil­i­ties, as well as the sim­pler gui­tar-ori­ent­ed arrange­ments of their ear­li­er record­ings. The attempt to con­struct an all-encom­pass­ing arc over the psy­che­del­ic con­tin­u­um comes to a head in “It Over­takes Me”, which builds some­thing of a pothead’s dialec­tic to syn­the­size the philoso­phies of Tim O’Leary and G.W.F. Hegel. Sil­ly syl­lo­gisms like these over­shad­ow their ongo­ing fas­ci­na­tion about the enor­mi­ty of the cos­mos and makes lyrics like “it mas­ter-slaves me/it wakes and bakes me” seem all the more trivial.

It’s not until late in the album that The Flam­ing Lips come alive. “The W.A.N.D.”, a hooky wish-ful­fill­ment anthem replete with hand­claps, improb­a­bly jux­ta­pos­es Har­ry Pot­ter in Paris ’68, inspired no doubt by the Chap­lin-esque belief that by plant­i­ng daisies in their bar­rels, the guns will fall silent. “Pompeii am Gotterdammerung” pays a dis­cor­dant trib­ute to Pink Floyd’s epic “One of These Days” in a cat­a­clysmic homage to the seem­ing­ly for­got­ten polit­i­cal tur­moil of gen­er­a­tions past. Infused with Wagner’s shat­ter­ing spir­it, it com­mu­ni­cates a pal­pa­ble despon­den­cy absent else­where on the album; how­ev­er, the ele­giac tone struck seems at best mis­placed or at worst utter­ly mis­spent on a record teem­ing with dis­trac­tions. Noth­ing else on the album reach­es either its breath­less apoc­a­lyp­ti­cism or its apt agnos­ti­cism on polit­i­cal questions.

Unlike The Soft Bul­letin’s pre­cious poignan­cy, or Yoshi­mi Bat­tles the Pink Robots lush com­ic book alle­gories, the lit­er­al­ly-mind­ed At War with the Mys­tics looks for easy answers in famil­iar tropes. The bit­ter­sweet opti­mism expressed in “Goin’ On” feels like an after­thought on an album so wracked with self-loathing and lib­er­al guilt. And while alien­ation and apa­thy are unques­tion­ably sober­ing sen­ti­ments, the glib, uneven pre­sen­ta­tion los­es sight of the big­ger pic­ture, strip­ping away the hope it wish­es to impart, leav­ing con­fu­sion, res­ig­na­tion and iner­tia in its place, reduc­ing their mes­sage to a mean-spir­it­ed eulo­gy for the future.