At War with the Mystics is the first Flaming Lips album I was properly alive and kicking for around the time of its release. I was eleven watching MTV2 almost every morning and the video for ‘The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song’ was showing very frequently. The song is all right. A bland opinion that I hold to this day. ‘The WAND’ followed some time after. While that one has a great groove to it, I hold that in the same regard as I do the ‘YYY Song’. Neither of them are bad though, and I can still dig them even 13 years on.

However, the track that really grabbed me from the album was ‘It Overtakes Me’. Not that I went out and actually bought the album. Actually I was either in bed or the living room and this advert for Becks beer came on. It was this weird stop-motion animation where these models were dancing to a thick bassline and an almighty groove. I later found out that it was the song that you see in the title. I’ll put that advert below just so you can all witness my impressive descriptive skills.

So ‘It Overtakes Me’ is the seventh track on At War with the Mystics. On the album itself, it’s merged with an almost-four minute instrumental entitled ‘The Stars Are So Big… I Am So Small… Do I Stand a Chance?’. I’m not too big a fan of that, but luckily the main song was edited to remove that section on its own EP and is the version you can listen to above. I might just link the instrumental at the bottom too.

As I said earlier, ‘It Overtakes Me’ is dominated by this thick and heavy bassline that’s at the forefront of the mix and is pretty much the melodic centre of the whole composition. While that bass is going on, Wayne Coyne sings about how insignificant and small he seems to be in this big wide world (a theme he tends to explore in the group’s music) and how the fact that we’re all on this sphere floating in space overwhelms him. It’s not all emotional though. There are some twinkling keyboard melodies, dramatic backing vocals, loose moments when a bandmember will yell out ‘Yeah’ in the midst of everything….. There’s a point where a vocal slowly transforms from a chipmunk-like pitch to a giant-like bellow too. It’s a very fun listen for something that can cause an existential crisis for some people.