Scripted Failures

I was wrong.  Yes, that’s right, I was wrong, and have been for three years.  Contrary to my early opinions and outspoken rants to my friends, The Flaming Lips’ “At War with the Mystics” does not suck.  I came to this realization today while giving it another try.  Now, while I have thought it was a terrible record for the past three years, I did enjoy right off the bat songs like “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song”, which is so incredibly joyous, “Vein of Stars”, which is one of the most haunting songs The Flaming Lips have recorded, and “Goin’ On”, which makes me feel more hopeful about the world’s future and my own personal future.  But other than that I basically hated the rest of the album, sans a few classic sounding Flaming Lips instrumental passages.  So this is my retraction and explanation of my sudden conversion.

Granted, some of you are probably saying right now, “Jesus Justin, this record isn’t as good as “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots”, which wasn’t as good as “The Soft Bulletin”, but was still good, and this record is literal light years away from being as good as “The Soft Bulletin”, which is in my opinion their best album.  I concede this willingly, but I will argue that, despite all that, it is a good record.  Just because a band’s new record isn’t as good as their past records doesn’t automatically bar it from being a good record.  Now that we’ve gotten out of that way, let me explain my sudden conversion.

I went into this album, as many of you probably did, hoping for some fusion of the dense orchestral beauty of “The Soft Bulletin” with the spacey synthetic-ness and ethereal instrumental tendencies of “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots”.  Therein lay my problem, and possibly your problem.  Coming into a record with such huge expectations like that is never a good thing.  Granted with bands like The Flaming Lips, whose past output has been so amazing, it’s hard not to have those expectations.  My sudden conversion came today when I dropped those expectations and listened to the album for what it is.  If “The Soft Bulletin” was The Flaming Lips doing orchestral pop, and “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” was The Flaming Lips doing synth-laden pop, then “At War with the Mystics” is The Flaming Lips doing some odd mixture of funk, rock, prog, spacey pop, and hippy protest songs all filtered through The Flaming Lips incredibly psychedelic lens.

Don’t believe me on that description?  Just look at the lyrics.  Most of them are direct reactions and protests to the then current and, unfortunately, still current darkness of the Bush regime and the world in general.  Look at the long song titles, especially the one with multiple parts separated by slashes.  That just screams hot prog action.  The songs with the aforementioned long titles scream hot prog action too, with their multiple sections, and twists and turns.  As for the funk, if you’ve listened to the record you know there’s some damn funky songs on there.

What I find most endearing about the album is the positivity.  Sure it’s hippy protest music, but it’s so incredibly positive.  It takes the world view of “Sure things are really fucked up, but there’s enough of us malcontents to turn this situation around if we really band together.”  Maybe I’m just a damn dirty hippy, but I can get behind that.  Of
course there’s also those beautiful Flaming Lips instrumental passages that I can never get enough of.

So listen to the record with all this in mind and see if you like it a bit better.  After all how can you resist Wayne singing, “We got the power now! Motherfuckers it’s where it belongs!,” on “The W.A.N.D (The Will Always Negates Defeat)”.  Just thinking about that puts a big goofy grin on my face.  Granted, there is still a semi-clunker or two on the record like “It Overtakes Me/The Stars Are So Big…I Am So Small…Do I Stand a Chance”, that I’m still on the fence about, but even semi-clunkers like that have their moments of grandeur.  Just listen to the second half of that song, which is the “The Stars Are So Big…” half, which begins with a classic Flaming Lips spacey instrumental and continues on with some gentle singing by Wayne.

I admit I haven’t gotten to the point where I’m totally ga ga about the album yet, but I have come to the conclusion that it is a good record.  So drop your preconceptions, listen to the record with the description I gave above in mind, and see what happens.  Leave comments and let me know if it changes your opinion.  I’m curious.

Okay, so now I’m truly going to destroy all my indie cred, but I can’t help it.  “Famous Last Words” is one of the most emotionally draining songs I’ve ever heard.  I know this record has been out for over a year, but who cares.  Sure, My Chemical Romance is way too over theatrical, but sometimes it works, and on this track it works like a charm.  The intro is sorta quiet, except for Gerard Way’s sneering vocals and those big guitar hits, before that nasty guitar riff comes in.  The verses are all brash and in your face with some nice guitar riffage, nothing too complex but perfect for the song.  The pre-chorus sweetens things up a little bit, and then comes the fucking huge chorus.  It’s huge I tell you.  “I am not afraid to keep on living. I am not afraid to walk this world alone.  Honey if you stay you’ll be forgiven.  Nothing you can say can stop me going home,” it goes.  Then after another round of verse, pre-chorus, and chorus, we get a huge Queen-ish build-up replete with big arena rock guitar solos, before it quiets down again.  Now all this is great in and of itself, but the real treat comes at the end of the song.  When the gut wrenching chords come in, things start building, the synths start to kick in full force, the lyrics build to their climax, and Gerard Way shoots up an octave to sing “I sleep all days, cause I see you lying next to me, with words I thought I’d never speak awake and unafraid”, that’s when the orgasm begins.  It reaches its totally satisfying conclusion when the vocal layers pile on the already huge musical canvas playing the aforementioned lyrics against the chorus lyrics.  The song fades out with these dueling layers in the forefront making you want to hit previous on your mp3 player to do it alllll over again.  I swear my heart breaks everytime i hear this song.  I don’t know why I resonate emotionally so much with this song, but I just do.  I think it’s the romanticism of those last lines.  Eventhough the kid has cancer he feels all right because the one he loves is lying beside him.  A hopeless romantic I admittedly am.

So once again this is old news, but I recently downloaded this album, so sue me.  This will be the first post of two that will probably destroy all of my indie cred, however Pitchfork likes to gush all over Mr. Z, so I might be safe.  When “The Black Album” came out and I finally got around to listening to it, I fell in love with it.  Hell, I’ll admit it, I love Jay-Z.  As everyone knows, after the album came out tons of remix albums came out including the infamous “Grey Album” which was a pairing of “The Black Album” with The Beatles “White Album”.  Somewhere recently, I’m sure it was on Pitchfork I saw some gushing over 9th Wonder’s remix of the album called “Black is Back”.  So I had to hear it.  Unfortunately, the version I downloaded had some annoying mp3 encoding errors, so I need a new copy, but this song was error free.  This is going to sound dumb, but this song came up on random while I playing Hexic, and I was immeadiately hooked.

This remix takes the bit of old school soul production that the original had and amps it up to the nth degree.  The original version was rather joyous, but this song takes that joyous to a whole new level.  This version is like a huge celebration, all in honor of how badass Jay-Z is.  Starting off with a gorgeous soul sample, instead of the Gladiator sample of the original, it just gets better from there.  If there’s one thing that I like about some of the current producers in rap these days, Kayne West and, apparently, 9th Wonder, is that they sample amazing old school soul songs.  It never fails that I end up researching and downloading the sampled song.  I haven’t done my research on this one, but it’s not far behind.  So, the soul sample loops itself throughout the whole song, which may sound repetitive on paper, but the sample is so rad it just doesn’t matter.  The beat is bangin’, and by the way that may be the only time you hear me say that phrase, and just adds to the celebratory feel of the song. The only thing I haven’t mentioned is Jay-Z’s rhymes which are top notch on this track.  He sounds so confident that I can’t help but believe every bit of bragging he spits out.  I just want to DJ a party and play this song, and get down in the crowd and dance with everyone!  That’s one of the main points of rap right, to get people to shake their ass?  Well this one definitely succeeds.

This is sort of “black market” album, considering it’s not an offically sanctioned remix album, so you won’t find it in stores, but if you go here you can you buy it. You might be able to find it cheaper somewhere else, but I’m not sure.  If I find it for cheaper I’ll let you know.  Hell, you might be able to find it on iTunes.  I’ll admit, I need to quit being a pirate and buy it.  It’s on my list, which is growing, yet decreasing at the same time as I finally buy albums I’ve loved for years.  You didn’t hear me say this, but find it and hear it at any cost, but if you must pirate it, at least support 9th Wonder and buy the damn thing if you dig it.  After all, piracy is wack, unless you’re stealing from Metallica, who deserve it for being pussies about Napster.