So with their relevance as innovators hanging in the balance, the Flaming Lips deliver their latest effort in the nick of time. Instead, it oversimplified the formula, leaving even the catchiest of those songs relatively limp. “Mystics” attempts to craft simpler, theoretically catchier-and typically somewhat monotonous-pop songs with the same sort of thematic import that made the elegant, orchestral, deeply emotive “Yoshimi” standout “Do You Realize?” such a runaway hit.
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Anyone familiar with the band’s two previous albums-“The Soft Bulletin” and 2002’s “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots”-will be able to point to the myriad recycle tropes that propped that record up. This is what made the band’s 2004 release, “At War With The Mystics,” such a frustrating album. Their greatest albums-1993’s “Transmissions from the Satellite Heart,” 1999’s “The Soft Bulletin,” and now 2009’s “Embryonic”-have all been the culmination of a radical change in sound and direction. But unlike the Dead, or any other group of comparable longevity, the Flaming Lips have fashioned a legacy through constant rejuvenation. Both bands derive their sound from a host of intersecting genres and traditions: the Dead had blues, country, and folk the Lips have punk, pop, and space rock.
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Like the Grateful Dead, that other storied American collective, the Flaming Lips are the residue of a revolutionary and long-outmoded turning point in popular music: the Dead had the psychedelic era the Lips had punk rock. state rock song “Do You Realize?”-whose sheer transcendence has insured the band immortality beyond all possible contingency. Wayne Coyne and his merry band of psychic minstrels have wandered the earth together for nearly 30 years, and in that time they’ve produced 12 studio albums, 2 documentaries and a feature film they’ve ridden the crest of approximately three musical waves and they’ve recorded exactly one song-Okla. Not that this sort of thing ever came around so often, or even that there was more than one like them to begin with. The Flaming Lips are an American musical institution, and they may be the last of their kind.