“At War..” presents an unfettered and unfolding landscape of what can, at best, be known as Stadium Stoner Rock.

It really doesn’t seem like four years ago that the Flaming Lips, then a relatively obscure and underloved oddity famous for “She Don’t Use Jelly”, released yet another underperforming album in the shape of “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots”.

If anything the intervening years have seen them grow conversely huge : the less they do the bigger they get. It’s known, in scientific circles, as the Pink Floyd effect. The follow up then, April’s “At War With The Mystics”, is by no means a disappointment.

The trademarks of their sound are here : but in some way strengthened. As if this were all the bits they take out and use to form Powdered Flaming Lips. An uber-concoction of their essence. The familiar tones of the always otherworldly Wayne Coyne from Oklahoma, and the rest of the band (again, not really known for the strength of their personality), sound like they’ve never been away. The quirky, obtuse lyrics that provide us with such wonderful titles as “The Cosmic Autumn Rebellion” and “It Overtakes Me, The Stars Are So Big, I Am So Small, Do I Stand A Chance?” are, as ever, in bafflingly prolific effect. The music too is familiar as the work of the men behind the Pink Robots, and yet it isn’t.

In some ways, the almost retrograde production harks back to 1997’s plain-fucking-weird “Zaireeka” (though thankfully without the 4CD experimentation), yet seems light years ahead at the same time. Borrowing prolifically from their sonic box of tricks of years past – the heavily distorted guitars that sound way too much like something else that used to be a guitar before it was FX’ed out of all recognition, the whimsical, child-learning-how-to-play piano work that underpins everything, and the weird phased percussion – “At War With The Mystics” is the sound of a dog relearning old tricks.

Thankfully, it’s a stronger album that the predecessor. Whereas the previous album suffered from the inclusion at random places of obtuse, forgettable sound collages with drums the cover erroneously called ‘songs’, “At War..” dispenses with this, and presents an unfettered and unfolding landscape of what can, at best, be known as Stadium Stoner Rock. It’s practically ideal for sitting around getting stoned. On CD or MP3 you don’t even have to get up to change sides.

Opening with the wonderfully navel-gazing “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song”, it’s clear this is no ordinary album. What ordinary album would open with a barbershop style quartet call-and-response debate of such questions as “If you could blow up the world at the flick of a switch would you do it? If you could make everyone poor so you could be rich would you do it?”. We sure as hell ain’t even on Earth anymore. If anything, The Flaming Lips have conquered the robots, and kept going into Inner Space.

Not to say that the Lips are stuck deep inside Dennis Quaid’s veins, but their music really serves the true purpose of art. To elevate. To take me to the other place. To move us beyond the mundane, the mediocre, the unaspirational who settle for something less than brillance, and gives us whole new colours to set loose on the imagination of our ears.

Ah, I’m being psuedo-intellectual again. But if music like this doesn’t make you realise that most music in the world, and most bands we love are actually dreadfully dull, then you are one of those who are At War With The Mystics. This is the music for the forward thinking mofo, the sonic warrior, the tripped out hippy scum that change the face of the earth, who instead of saying no, ask the most important question of our species. “What If….?” 

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