Flaming Lips get political on new album

Getting political
“At War with the Mystics,” however, is a little (just a little) more direct. It can slide comfortably next to “Bulletin” and “Yoshimi” as the third post-“Zaireeka” Lips album, but it’s also as playful as the earlier work and likely to be defined by its political themes.

On “Free Radicals” Coyne takes aim at George Bush: “You think you’re radical, but you’re not so radical. In fact, you’re fanatical.”

“I don’t think all the record has a radical, political, overthrow-the-government sort of vibe to it, but I think some of it does,” says Coyne. “But I don’t want anyone to think that I really am trying to overthrow the government with our music, or stop the war with our music — that’s just for fools.”

On “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” though, Coyne points the finger back at himself, wondering if he could do any better himself. He sings, “What would you do with all your power?”

One of the disc’s finest songs, “Sound of Failure/It’s Dark ... Is it Always this Dark?” is from the perspective of a teenage girl trying to live “from the inside out” after a personal tragedy. It also names Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani as examples of music that doesn’t “know what it means to be dead” — that is, acknowledge the real pain in life.

Coyne, whose mother died during the making of “Mystics,” describes the song as fighting against “that cheerleader mentality of nothing bad can happen to me as long as I’m smiling and dancing.”

“Music — music that moves you — usually comes because something horrible has happened to you. It’s cathartic,” Coyne says. “I think music does that better than almost any other art form, because most of our lives are about things that don’t work out.”

In the end, maybe the Flaming Lips aren’t as out of this world as they seem.

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