Pitchfork

Sometime between The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, as the Flaming Lips earned a rep as the best live band on the rock circuit, they trained their fans to associate them not just with ear-splitting surreal pop and electric light-music orchestras, but with an entire mindset: the big grins, the man-sized fuzzy animals, and visions of gigantic beach balls gliding across the audience. In fact, the only song I remember them playing was "Happy Birthday". It's surprising that the Flaming Lips don't spend more time making lifestyle accessories; I'd pay top dollar for a day-glo pink inflatable recliner that comes with its own light show!

This new mix disc, assembled for Azuli's LateNightTales series, is a perfect example of Lips-branded atmosphere. The album does more than showcase the band's taste in classic and contemporary pop; it sets a precise and peculiar mood, a kind of late-night sensation that's weightless but not silly, and askew but not deranged. Most of the tunes sound like they were made out of yawns, smoke, and sighs, and aside from a couple of bumps, it's an indisputable post-party mix.

Oddly, the songs that least belong are the exclusive recordings. David Shirgley's "The Jist", a disturbing spoken word piece that feels like pure stoner talk, closes the album and overrides what could have been a blissful send-off courtesy of Brian Eno's "Another Green World". The other curveball is the Flaming Lips' cover of the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army", a piece of sonic hostility with sirens, fuzzed-out riffs, and Coyne emoting through a megaphone. It's cartoonishly effective and less terse and gritty than the Stripes' original, but this isn't the side of the band you'd expect to hear on this mix; it's a nice hook for collectors, but not essential by itself. (You can hear the single at the start of their promotional Radio Mix, found online here.)

The rest of the album is damn near sublime. Björk's "Unravel" ushers us in, and then gently segues to the champagne music of Miles Davis playing Gershwin's "My Ship". Sexual urges are sublimated throughout the album, evoking the late-night making out that it was built to soundtrack; on "Speed of Sound", Chris Bell makes a lyric about not getting laid sound like the ballad of the unknown soldier, while Nick Drake's "River Man" is a little too obviously the song where you should lean over and make your move.

The Lips know how to use each song to bring out what's strange or special about the others, so that 10cc's "I'm Not In Love" sounds far more psychedelic here than it ever did on your mom's AM radio, and Radiohead's "Pyramid Song" shakes off any of the studied chilliness it absorbed from Amnesiac. And the album's good-natured, fun-and-shiny undercurrent explodes in cuts by the Chameleons and the Psychedelic Furs, which prove once again that you could make a mix disc for a funeral and there'd still be room for 1980s new wave.

While the promotion for this album emphasizes how many years and styles it spans, anyone who's made an eclectic mix knows that finding what the songs have in common is more important than emphasizing what sets them apart. This record is perfect for the end of a night when the lines are getting blurry and no one has to move, or drive home, or even get up from where they're lying in the back yard, while the last strains of Eno greet the first bleed of dawn: What's this bubble we've landed in, and why does it ever have to burst?

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