At a recent Webster Hall show, lead singer Wayne Coyne broke out a kid’s toy that produces farm animal sounds, attached it to an amplifier and proceeded to write a rock song with the sounds “moo” and “quack.” Imagine for a moment what that might sound like, and then consider these lyrics from ‘YeahYeahYeah Song,’ the opening track of At War with the Mystics: “If you could blow up the world with the flick of a switch/Would you do it?/If you could make everybody poor just so you could be rich/Would you do it?” How do you reconcile the tension between farm animal psych rock and serious Bush-hating? If you’re the Flaming Lips, you cloak your incendiary lyrics in power-pop melodies, add a liberal dose of fuzzy guitar riffs, and stir it all up with the cinematic grandeur of Pink Floyd. This is a recipe for several stellar tracks and an album that hangs on the precipice between naked allegory and haphazard revelation. By linking political theatrics to their love of the surreal, the Lips indict the administration with the same ambitious, bizarre brilliance they’ve been honing for the past 20 years
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