| The story of The Flaming Lips is one of the most inconsistent, strange and triumphant tales in rock. First emerging over 20 years ago as damaged psych-rockers more interested in volume and noise than real listenability, The Flaming Lips of today are a near-religious experience, filling huge venues with the band dressed in bunny suits, confetti and oversized balloons raining down from the rafters.
For At War with the Mystics, Wayne Coyne & Company have moved their focus from Supermen and giant pink robots to a more pointed attack on the current political state of the world in which we live. Asking, "If you could blow up the world with the flick of a switch /Would you do it? /With all your power /What would you do?" "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" opens the proceedings with a candy-coated plea for consideration, while "The Sound of Failure/It’s Dark… Is it Always this Dark??" is the type of sadness-as-beauty space epic the Lips have perfected.
While Mystics may occasionally lose its focus – at times, tracks like the Beck Midnight Vultures white-funk pastiche of "Free Radicals" and "It Overtakes Me/The Stars are So Big, I am So Small… Do I Stand a Chance?" exist more in service of producer Dave Fridmann’s studio trickery than for themselves – it’s a chapter in the Flaming Lips discography that still manages (albeit barely) to fit in alongside the epic back-to-back achievements of The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.
Given the records it follows, it’s hard to not be somewhat disappointed with At War with the Mystics without giving it a chance to impress on its own terms. While there’s no immediate jump-out pieces to the puzzle, Mystics gradually reveals itself as an album to be experienced beginning-to-end, more of an over-arching story than a series of stand-alone single-ready tunes.
In it for the entirety of the Lips’ long and crazed journey, bassist Michael Ivins admits Mystics’ primary influence as, "the usual stories and themes in the songs, putting a positive spin on death and despair." That said, there’s a lot more on the Flaming Lips’ minds this time out.
"We got caught up in the last election, with those recent world shenanigans playing a part. Things are definitely political this time," Ivins says, admitting full well that the pointed sentiments found in songs like "The W.A.N.D." ("We got the power now motherfuckers / That’s where it belongs") are hard to miss.
Still, no matter how clear things may appear, The Flaming Lips have always been the type of band endlessly reinterpreted and rabidly analyzed.
"What happens is that people take the record and absorb it, putting their own thoughts in. We do try to shape the albums into something meaningful, but the true meanings take about a year to settle in. Things are revealed gradually to us, too – even Yoshimi now has a completely different meaning for me than it did when we made it."
It comes as little surprise, then, that since The Soft Bulletin’s release upon the world, just about every note of music ever performed by The Flaming Lips has found special edition re-release. Alongside the compiled efforts from 1985 onward, the feature-length documentary Fearless Freaks (featuring material filmed since the late-1980s by Coyne’s long-time friend Bradley Beesley) crept behind the curtain without blinking, to the point of displaying Steven Drozd’s heroin habit full-frame. For Ivins, this veritable five-year retrospective "really taught the importance of realizing how hindsight – in a personal way versus broader way – doesn’t really do you any good. Some foresight, on the other hand, would have done a lot of good."
Considering The Flaming Lips’ string of near-perfect albums (begun rather auspiciously with 1993’s Beverly Hills 90210-approved Transmissions from the Satellite Heart), keeping a foothold on the pedestal upon which they’ve been placed is certainly a challenge. By this point, however, Ivins admits they’ve chosen to just look to themselves to get things done.
"In the studio we’re in panic mode all of the time, worrying about living up to our own expectations," he says. "We’ve stopped worrying about issues of cool a long time ago – we’ve spent years performing in animal suits. We’re just focused on working in support and in service of the songs in creation and performance."
Suitably infamous for their live performances, Ivins also reveals some upcoming surprises.
"We’ve got Santas on one side, aliens on the other. It’s the battle of Scientology versus a Christian ideal. We want them to have a huge battle onstage."
What’s most surprising about the Flaming Lips is not only how grandiose their collective vision has become, but that they’ve managed to last this long and touch so many in a way few other bands ever have.
"We’ve lasted as long as we have because from the beginning we’ve just loved music so much," Ivins says. "If you’re in a band, you’ve got to love it and put up with a lot of crap, and that’s it. Even when it’s bad, you’ve just got to keep going. At the end of the day, we’re in our 40s and just hitting our stride and peak. You can’t have any regrets for doing it – that’s the best time to stop. We’ve got nothing to complain about."
Hours before taking the stage in Toronto to kick off the lengthy Mystics world tour to come, Ivins presents a simple chemistry for The Flaming Lips’ seemingly everlasting power.
"Wayne has to do it. He’s compelled to do it. Steven’s so talented that it would be a shame if he didn’t. And I just love it so much. I’m not the greatest in the world, nor the best of anything, but I can bring into being a lot of things. Every day I wake up and say, ‘Yes, I want to do this!’ and that’s enough." |
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