The Obligatory

So I'm going to try to start something new here, a little something more than my occasional ramblings on hiking, microbreweries and digital rights issues.

Mini-music reviews.

Why mini? Well, for one, I don't really have the time to do a full-on review right now. Maybe sometime in the future, I'll get to do research, make clever allegories, and then get really self-indulgent, like Pitchfork.

But for now, I'm going to try just giving you First Impressions of whatever I just bought. Sometimes it'll be new, sometimes it'll be really, really old. Sometimes it'll be on the day after its released, sometimes at some random time. It's a crapshoot. At least it'll keep you on your toes.

I'm going to load the disc on my iPod, bring it to work, and listen to it once through during the day, taking notes on that most trustworthy of programs - Notepad. Then I'll try to make 'em make sense. That's it. One listen. Notepad, then Blogger.

So behold the first First Impressions - for the new Flaming Lips disc, "At War With The Mystics."



For their first album in four years, the venerable statesmen of left-of-left-field noise pop have returned, with more direct music and lyrics ... and really, can anything be more unexpected from the Flaming Lips?

Thankfully, 'direct music' is an extremely relative term, and the Lips don't fail to create sounds from bizarro sources on this album. Even a fairly straightforward fuzz-guitar led song like "Free Radicals" is filled with enough twisted vocal samples and studio effects to keep the most inquisitive headphone-listener busy.

Perhaps some of the feeling of directness comes not from the songs themselves, but rather from the album as a whole. Instead of having the unified lush pop symphony sound of "The Soft Bulletin" or the prog rock mini-opera feel of "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots," the songs of "Mystics" jump from style to style. "Free Radicals" is a stripped down, slowed down funk song. "The Sound of Failure..." opens with a classical guitar before adding enough wah-wah and flute loops to sound like a time capsule from the 70s, as if opened, dissected and reassembled by future technocrats.

But as I listened to this for the first time, I couldn't help but compare it to those old albums. It's unfair, but it's going to happen to anyone who's familiar with their past work. And the bottom line is, there's no one song on here that jumps out at you as immediately beautiful as "Do You Realize??" or as catchy as "Fight Test."

Lyrically, the album seems to be a bit TOO straightforward. Whereas before, the Lips were content to bury their themes in third or first person narrative allegories, now they're more willing to just come out and say it. And say it to "you." Songs like "Gash" or "Fight Test" play up the narrator's shortcomings and mistakes, while songs like "Haven't Got A Clue" attack the listener - or the undetermined "you". Lines like "every time you state your case, the more I want to punch your face" seem a bit ... beneath the Lips.

Which is not to downplay this album, but just to put it into perspective. There are plenty of great moments here. "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" has a great twisted rhythm and a singalong chorus. The touching "Mr. Ambulance Driver" puts a siren to a soft guitar shuffle that'll make you tap your foot while the song muses mortality. The epic "It Overtakes Me" builds handclaps and a bass line to a kick-ass backbeat before exploding into a shimmering spacescape reminiscent of the best moments of "Soft Bulletin" and "Yoshimi."

And that's the major problem. No matter how good this album is, when you're done, you're probably going to want to listen to one of their older ones next ... which, when you're talking about the Flaming Lips, is not necessarily a bad thing at all.

In One Sentence: Psychadelic Noise Pop from the masters of the form.
Bottom Line: Worth a listen, but not as good as their recent work.

A damn fine review, sir. I do hope to see more.