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At War with the Mystics is the eleventh album by the Flaming Lips. It was released on April 3, 2006, in international markets, and April 4, 2006, in the United States. The album is more guitar-driven and features more politically themed lyrics than The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.
"The Wizard Turns On..." won a 2006 Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. The album was nominated for the Best Alternative Album Grammy. The 5.1 mix of the album was nominated for Best Surround Sound Album in 2008.
The track "It Overtakes Me" has gained considerable interest, being featured as the soundtrack to a UK television commercial for Beck's beer, and "The W.A.N.D." has been used in European advertisements for Bud Light and for Dell Computers in the UK and the U.S. It includes a different mix of the song, "Mr. Ambulance Driver", which was originally used as part of the soundtrack to the 2005 film Wedding Crashers.
User Album Review
In every sense, At War With The Mystics is the Flaming Lips' biggest release to date. But if you wanted to see Yoshimi back in the ring for another round with those pink robots, think again; this is no rematch.
Under the wing of resident producer Dave Fridmann, the band's penchant for stargazing soundscapes gets explored more fully than ever before. In fact, "The Wizard Turns On..." isn't so much a song as a sci-fi SFX reel. But the Flaming Lips always manage to bring things down to Earth with a pop.
Album opener "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" is typicallydisposable, but utterly addictive.Coyne's falsetto on the funk-driven "Free Radicals" takes him to the dodgy ground between Beck and Prince. Thankfully, he quickly redeems himself on "Vein Of Stars" and "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion".
At War... shines brightest when the lyrics take a back seat, bringing Fridmann's genius and the band's sonic imagination to the fore. There's no denying the prog-rock brilliance of "The W.A.N.D." and "Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung", but these two gems sit rather uncomfortably within the album's hotchpotch of sounds and styles. If Yoshimi's cutesy existentialism drew new legions of fans to the Lips, At War's incoherence will inevitably divide them.
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