ONE problem with releasing a couple of signature albums is that, if your career is subsequently long enough and you have a bit of a hiatus, you’ll inevitably find your comeback effort being billed as a return to your previous musical touchstones. And so it is with Oklahoma space cadets The Flaming Lips, back after four years off from the psych-rock treadmill.

They find Oczy Mlody – it means "eyes of the young" in Polish – being likened to their late '90s/early '00s heyday of The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, which smacks purely of an attempt to link it to the Lips’ best-known work.

This is a very different animal; less warped, carefree, often baffling psychedelia, more R&B, pop, funk, and experimentation. Yet for all the exploration on show here, Oczy Mlody works best when it adopts a conventional sheen, or at least as conventional as Wayne Coyne and friends are ever likely to get.

On How, Coyne sings “I tried to tell you, but I don’t know how”, and you’re suddenly struck by the realisation that this is a Flaming Lips song that contains a straightforward lyrical hook rather than some sort of cosmic jargon.

Mainstream might be pushing it, but by Lips standards, it’s remarkably accessible, as is the tech-groove of There Should Be Unicorns (until someone who is apparently Darth Vader does a spoken-word interjection), trip-hop ballad The Castle and closing track We A Family, a crowd-pleasing soft-rocker that features Coyne duetting with Miley Cyrus. Really.

The contradiction of the best moments on a Flaming Lips record being the near-normal ones is thrown into sharper focus by the averageness of the further-out material on Oczy Mlody – Do Glowy, in particular, is not just an album low-point, it’s possibly a career one.

If it’s not an album at war with itself, Oczy Mlody certainly has two personalities that aren’t getting on very well with each other. The result is reasonably pleasant confusion, and knowing this band, that might have been what they were aiming for all along.