CD review

Posted on Thursday, April 27th, 2006, 12:00 am

The Flaming Lips

“At War With The Mystics”

Warner Brothers

The Flaming Lips released their album, “At War With The Mystics,” as their first record in three years, and the results, musically, are about what you’d expect. But lyrically, as you might guess from the title, the band seems to have a soft anti-war axe to grind. They’re doing it in a room filled with lava lamps while wearing animal costumes, but yes, the hallucinogenic Lips have become political.

This is more of a departure for The Flaming Lips than most indie bands. Their best known song, “She Don’t Use Jelly,” is emblematic of the sort of nonsensical playfulness you’d find in most of their lyrics. Though they revealed great lyrical depth with their 1999 album “The Soft Bulletin,” the band had usually rested in a comfortably abstract lyrical world.

Now there are psychedelically politicized lyrics, coming across at times like a leftist children’s record. “If you could make everybody poor, just so you could be rich, would you do it?” sings Wayne Coyne in “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” to be answered with “Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah!” by a chorus of Donald Duck-sounding voices surrounded by handclaps before Wayne declares, “We cannot know ourselves or what we’d really do with all your power.”

But you just want to know if it rocks. The answer is yes, though in a different way with every click on your iPod. The band embraces the funk-pop weirdness of Beck with “Free Radicals,” then shifts to a Pink Floyd-esque “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion.”

The album doesn’t produce many standouts, but that doesn’t mean the music isn’t any good. The album as a whole is more interesting for the songs that will never find their way onto mix CDs. The album shows off a range of influences, from Bacharach-like easy listening and Brazilian Psych rock, to the sonic weirdness of the Dr. Who theme. But this penchant for genre-hopping doesn’t always work. “Mr Ambulance Driver,” sounds a bit like Hall and Oates cutting a pop-country single. The album also closes on a dull note with “Goin’ On,” which accurately describes what the song does. So you know, “Goin’ On” was the only song the New York Times reviewer enjoyed. Just passing that along.

On the whole, this record won’t disappoint fans of any of the band’s last three records. If the band dropped off your radar after “She Don’t Use Jelly,” well, maybe it’s time to come back to all the willfully non-hit experimentation and creativity this band has to offer.

Or maybe you could get a job as a record reviewer for the New York Times.

-Eryk Salvaggio