EPs are a mixed bag - sometimes they're brilliant and wonderful, moreso than the very album they were created to herald, and other times they're just fillers to keep the band's name out there between albums. The Flaming Lips recently issued the Ego Tripping At the Gates Of Hell EP a few months after the release of the Fight Test EP. The results of both straddles the two sides of the EP coin - parts of them are great, parts of them are totally unnecessary.

Fight Test fares the weakest for me. While it contains more per-song greatness, overall it's not as satisfying as I'd hoped it would be. A trilogy of cover songs follows the title track - an epic treatment of Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" which is slowed to a glacial, but grand crawl (and which highlights the song's minimal lyrics - "I just can't get you out of my head/boy you're all I think about" and "la la la, la la la la la" repeated over and over,) followed by Beck's "The Golden Age," which the band had worked out touring as his back-up band for several months - they give it an almost Radiohead-like workover, which makes the following cover of Radiohead's "Knives Out" make even more sense. The strength of these songs comes from the Flaming Lips taking the songs and really making them their own - none would sound too far out of place on any Lips album. Given the Lips' wildly weird older music, "Can't Get You Out of My Head" fits in perfectly with their particular sound-niche, melding prog-rock into acid-drenched indie-pop. Unfortunately, the next track is an entirely pointless nine minute Scott Hardkiss remix of "Do You Realize??" that entirely disrupts the flow. Better to skip it and head straight to the only two "real" new tracks on the EP - "Strange Design of Conscience," a bleeping, blooping electronic-y new track that sounds more like a demo than a finished track, and a humorous ode to a light-up statue of Christ given to singer Wayne Coyne, "Thank You Jack White (For the Fiber Optic Jesus You Gave Me." The latter is a cutesy throw-away track, but is just fun enough that it brings back some of the oddball humor the band used to be known for. The former indicates that a shift into more electronics may be in the future for the band. Whether that's good or bad is still up in the air - the next album will tell us.