The Kiss of Death

The Flaming Lips started out as yet another weird art band destined for the small performance spaces of '80s bohemia. But somehow, despite their boom-box orchestra--singer Wayne Coyne conducting 40 people wielding boom boxes--their occasional onstage bunny suits and their splattering of audience members with fake blood, they've not only survived for 24 years, but thrived. The most bizarre part of the story: they were actually signed to a major label (Warner Brothers), actually produced a pop hit (1993's "She Don't Use Jelly")--and the critically acclaimed "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" has actually just gone gold. (True, it came out in 2002.)

Their new CD, "At War With the Mystics," and their well-timed biography--Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma's Fabulous Flaming Lips" by Chicago pop-music critic Jim DeRogatis--marks one more artistic (and perhaps commercial) high point for the band. The Lips are one of the few experimental acts who seem to remember, and care, that the audience is listening. "Mystics" is an invitingly freakish, downright pretty and even moving record: one part early Pink Floyd, one part the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" and one part small-town science museum. It features shimmering keyboards, fuzzy psychedelic guitar and everyday found sounds--a creaking door, a beeping alarm--and the songs are tethered together with what sounds like signals from outer space.

All its songs here swirl around one central theme: our preoccupation with death. And oddly, they're optimistic, funny and beautiful. One, "The Sound of Failure," ponders mortality through the eyes of a teenage girl who's lost a friend; another, "Free Radicals," argues with a suicide bomber about his motivations. Coyne's voice is breezy and cool, and his backing harmonies are beyond pleasing, but he's got sharp elbows: in "Haven't Got a Clue," he tells George W. Bush "Every time you state your case/The more I want to punch your face."

These songs are catchy, but never predictable. Take the new single, "Mr. Ambulance Driver"; it's built around the blare of a siren yet tempered by the whoosh of uplifting melodies. Coyne has called it "an easy-listening teen-car-crash ballad." "At War With the Mystics" illuminates death with the fragmented light of a spinning disco ball, and it reminds us that life is anything but ordinary.