Critical darlings and alt-rock veterans Flaming Lips seem to have been on a permanent upward trajectory since 1983, both in terms of success and musical extravagance, from the scratchy, lo-fi punk of 1983 through the bonkers neo-prog of 1999's "The Soft Bulletin" and 2002's "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots." So where could chief sonic scientist Wayne Coyne possibly go next? "An album influenced equally by The Neptunes, the composer Wagner and the Pink Floyd songbook," suggests NME (eight out of 10). "The Bush era's first cosmic protest album," offers the Guardian (four stars out of five), referring to the titular "Mystics," who are apparently the evangelical neocons of the Bush government. "Coyne has seen off his last vestiges of sanity and thrown caution to the wind with this, the band's finest and most broadly experimental album to date," states Play Louder (four-and-a-half out of five). The Los Angeles Times (three-and-a-half out of four), meanwhile, hears "a delirious jumble of android psychedelia and Coyne's elliptical wordplay that goes down as easily as warm milk (spiked with acid)."
Others are less impressed by the logical conclusion of the Flaming Lips' lavish experimentation. The Village Voice, for one, is nostalgic for a simpler age: "A band whose trademark was investing tired classic-rock tropes with a fresh sense of noisy adolescent charm have reduced themselves to purveyors of psychedelic pabulum." Pitchfork (rating 6.7) agrees that Coyne may have abandoned some of his more earthbound charms in his quest for the stars; noting "the possibility that the Flaming Lips are an idea and a project as much of a band, and records are just one of the organization's many concerns," it concludes that "much of the record sounds like chords and melodies were written later, as an afterthought to flesh out production experiments." In other words, as the New York Post (two-and-a-half out of four) points out, what "the Flaming Lips can't grasp is that people dance with their hips, not their heads."
Let me just say that The Village Voice music columnist is a aging dickbreathed hippy, that Pitchfork at least get's the point, the Flaming Lips ARE an Idea, as well as a cult, and the New York Post missed the point completely, because who fucking dances to the Flaming Lips?
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