Flaming Lips
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
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Flaming Lips
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
Warner Bros., 2002
RiYL: Pink Floyd, B52s, Jellyfish |
Explosive opener "Fight Test" is an emotionally naked, musically bombastic look at the choices we make growing up. "I don't know how a man decides what's right for his own life," frontman Wayne Coyne muses throughout the summer-single chorus, as the group fashions its most electric pop song since the 10-year-old fluke hit "She Don't Use Jelly."
But after that very humanistic start, the album takes an early detour into the world of machines. "One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21" is the tale of a man-made machine "learning" the approximation of human existence; what it means to feel. "Unit 3000-21 is warming / makes a humming sound / when its circuits duplicate emotions." Over the world-weary, futuristic rhythms and tones, Coyne ponders the moral implications of such technological advances: "is it wrong to think it's love when it tries the way it does?"
The next two tracks form the album's title suite, pitting these advanced man-made machines against the human race itself. "Part 1" explains the saga of government-hired martial arts combatant Yoshimi, practicing to use her deadly skills against armies of "evil-natured" pink robots which are apparently threatening mankind. This results in one of the most lyrically off-kilter singalong refrains in memory: "Oh Yoshimi / they don't believe me / but you won't let those robots defeat me." It also results in the woofer-blasting pulse of "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, Part 2," on which the battle screams of the Boredoms' Yoshimi Yokota are woven into art by the deft editing and relentless rhythms of messrs. Coyne, Drozd and Ivins.
From there, the album ventures back into the wide territory of the human emotional landscape. "It's Summertime (Throbbing Orange Pallbearers)" reflects a funeral held on a beautiful balmy day, with Coyne exhorting "I can understand if you still feel sad ... when you look inside all you'll see is a self-reflected inner sadness ... look outside / I know that you'll recognize / It's summertime," telling his listeners that there are still beautiful possibilities in the world, though some we cared about have already passed from it.
"Do You Realize," the album's thematic centerpiece, is the aural equivalent of an introspective LSD trip, its simple truths framed as mind-expanding revelations about human life. "Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die? But instead of saying all of your goodbyes, let them know you realize that life goes fast -- it's hard to make a good thing last." Penultimate track "All We Have Is Now" echoes this "gather ye rosebuds while ye may" sentiment, which dominates the album's second half. It's not an incredibly weighty philosophical platform, but it's honest advice on living a fulfilling life, and that the Lips are able to frame these concepts within such an impressive soundscape makes for a very satisfying listening experience, to say the least.
With longtime producer Dave Fridmann behind the boards, the group continues to explore the lush, rhythmic territory visited on 1997's 4-CD Zaireeka and The Soft Bulletin. The Lips' studio technique is only getting better with time, evidenced by the spatial control that allows many overlapping instruments and noises to each be duly appreciated on cuts like both "Yoshimi"s, "Are You A Hypnotist?," "Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell" and the majestic instrumental closer "Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon (Utopia Planitia)."
All in all, the group treads through cloudlike tone-fields, violent battles, otherworldly coronation marches, and celebratory funeral dirges over the course of a 47-minute disc. With "Yoshimi," the Flaming Lips add another notch to their growth chart, which has seen the group rise from the lysergic guitar trash-art of their early albums to become a sort of populist Pink Floyd. Their music is now part of the collective public consciousness -- appearing in TV ads, stealing the show at holiday radio concerts, showing up Beck on a collaborative tour -- and it couldn't happen to a nicer band. Truly, if you get visited by time-travelers this season, and you scan your collection trying to figure out how to best explain "pop music of the future," you could do a lot worse than letting your eyes fall on the pink and green spine of Yoshimi.
TROY CARPENTER | Troy Carpenter founded NATN from a Chicago apartment during the ambitious winter of 1998 with co-conspirators Ben French and Jonathan Cohen. After a five-year stint in New York, he and wife Lourdes have recently relocated to Indianapolis, where he spends days listening to music and nights in the kitchen at Elements restaurant. Musical heroes: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Super Furry Animals. What else makes life worth living: Sushi, Phucty, runs in the park, and the Atlanta Braves.