It was bound to happen sooner or later. The Flaming Lips’ new At War With the Mystics has, by and large, been panned by the critics as a failure. Oh, pay no mind to that score of 74 on review clearinghouse Metacritic — the mean is deceiving. Pitchfork says it “doesn’t measure up.” The band sounds “tired” – as confirmed by Rolling Stone and yours truly, while others sharpen their fangs more aggressively, deeming it “vague and bloated”, “the sound of a band run dry” and “wank riddled parody”. Even many of the more favorable reviews—and there are a few—hedge some, saying …Mystics “might even disappoint on first listen” and “falls short of being a masterpiece”.
So, what exactly is going on here? Is At War With the Mystics really as bad as all that? To be honest, I’m still warming up to it myself. Yet on the first few listens, there’s nothing about the record that indicates some colossal drop-off in quality.
Could it be that The Flaming Lips are getting their comeuppance? It’s no secret that this is a band coming off one of the most unlikely stretches in pop history – an affable psych-pop outfit signed to a major label in the wake of Nirvana’s success, who not only scored a novelty hit but also managed to peak with its ninth and tenth albums. And for all the critical and mass acceptance that came with #9 (The Soft Bulletin) and #10 (Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots), so, too, has there always been a snarky undercurrent to the press’s coverage of the band’s success – a reaction that the group, admittedly, had opened themselves up to with Wayne Coyne’s musings about insects, robots and shrieking Japanese girls as well as a stage act replete with giant bunnies, fake blood and fairydust. Consequently, for all the praise heaped on them these last several years, The Flaming Lips have always seemed to be one small crack in their toy armor away from being revealed as some kind of fraud.
And it appears that At War with the Mystics may be the crack they’ve been waiting for. To be sure, the record’s a mess – and depending on your perspective, either a glorious or disgraceful one. Where Yoshimi’s chief refinement of Bulletin’s wide-eyed orchestral wonder occurred in its replacement of multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd’s usually Bonham-esque sonic boom with a tighter, more programmed bottom, …Mystics returns Drozd to his kit with a vengeance, resulting in a huge, live sound that widens the sonic canvass considerably, before the group proceeds to fill it with piles upon piles of overdubs — of sirens, squeals, talk boxes, and what have you. That the record’s all over the map stylistically, veering from cosmically yearning balladry to N.E.R.D.-esque fuzz funk to psychedelic freak-out in the blink of an eye, only reinforces the sense of rudderless confusion. And that’s to say nothing of lyrics that trade in the pseudo-profound meditations on mortality that defined the previous records to take aim at 21st Century power — in particular, that uniquely American synthesis of politics and celebrity.
As a listening experience, it’s disorienting, even offputting. Might such audio-conceptual schizophrenia have occurred by design? Given the subject matter, possibly – after all, this is a band that once titled a song “Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World.” Regardless, it appears a lot of people aren’t willing to give them the benefit of the doubt this time around.
If that is, indeed, the critical consensus, it seems to miss what made The Flaming Lips special in the first place. In recent years, I’ve been famously ridiculed around Stylus parts for writing off most new pop music not only as tame, but more importantly for lacking in the tension and energy created when the listener experiences something honest-to-God original and unique. It’s hard to imagine such energy given the “safe room” dynamics shaping the pop music industry today – from Nick Drake-ian sotto voce vocals that lack emotional range, to “edgy” productions so finely balanced as to suck all the life out of them, to melodies that seek to comfort or mark time instead of surprise.
In part because of such dynamics, I’ve become increasingly convinced that the most interesting and forward-looking new music is often driven not by the combination of any particular influence but rather by the artists’ motivations — in particular, their willingness to not merely fail but embarrass themselves outright. No, I’m not talking about Scissor Sisters-brand outrageousness (a time-honored commodity in pop since Little Richard), but rather artists who put special emphasis on not only getting the listener’s attention and trust, but then push the bounds of acceptibility from within that relationaship to the point that they might lose the listener entirely — or worse, face outright hostility and ridicule. It’s a big risk to be sure — but when it works, the listener will be engaing with ideas and sounds that he or she previously never would have considered much less enjoyed.
With Coyne straining his voice to yelp about magic wands, the meaning of death and a hundred other subjects any person seeking credibility wouldn’t go near—with a palette of production devices that Cecil B. DeMille would have admired as much as Genesis or Tomita even—The Flaming Lips have always challenged the assumption that risk had gone out of pop. Whether or not the Lips calibrated such risks appropriately with At War With the Mystics is beside the point; unlike so many other pop bands today, this is one that’s clearly still trying. And given their track record, maybe we should, too.