The Flaming Lips return to the fold with this neatly packaged mini-album featuring four new tracks and a series of remixes from their 2002 opus, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. Fans of that particular masterwork will doubtless be enthused to learn that Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell is, broadly speaking, more of the same - a development certainly unlikely to yield complaints from this corner of HP Towers.
Listening to the mournful sci-fi lullaby of ‘Ego Tripping’, one feels, immediately at home with Wayne Coyne’s familiar plaintive croon. Not that this is by any means a gloom-fest.
Just take a listen to the opening monologue from ‘Sunship Balloons’: “I don’t know the dimensions of outer space, but if our ability to feel love turns out to be just a cosmic accident, then I’d like to think this means that the universe is on our side.” If this was, say, Sting, we’d all be defenestrating ourselves from 15 stories up, but Coyne’s unaffected optimism seduces the listener into wholehearted concurrence.
We’re also treated to the tranquillising ambient wash of ‘I’m A Fly In A Sunbeam (Following The Funeral Procession Of A Stranger)’, not to mention ‘A Change At Christmas (Say It Isn’t So)’, a tune so aspirational, it tugs at the heart strings of even this inveterate cynic.
For a moment, it’s almost possible to believe that this life is as wonderful as Frank Capra once posited. Messrs Coyne, Drozd and Ivins, with this exquisite sonic feast you are surely spoiling us.