Day 0940 - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

The Flaming Lips “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” (2002) – got it

A continuation of the brilliantly trippy pop sound of 1999’s “The Soft Bulletin” (see day 890).   I could see that it would be easy enough with this album to make comparisons to the Beatles, what with it being a spacey baroque pop.  To my ears though, it sounds more like ‘psychedelic Bacharach’ with its clash of laid-back, beautiful melodies with crazy sounds.  This dichotomy between the weird and the traditional is probably best exemplified by Parts one and two of the title track.  The first of which is an earnest acoustic ballad with trippy trappings, the second of which is a proggy noise-fest punctuated with human screams.

On the face of it, this seems as though it’s a concept album, with its sci-fi overtones, the two-part title track and the continued references to robots and fights.  Singer Wayne Coyne though has refuted the idea, so it seems like there are just some similar lyrical ideas.  The opening track was deemed to be a bit close to Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son” so he was given a writing credit.  The lyrics of that song (“Fight Test”) seem to turn against pacifism and state the need to fight.  I remember some people at the time opining that this was a reference to 9/11… I personally don’t think so, but if anyone was going to recast Al Qaeda as pink robots then I guess it’d be the Flaming Lips.

Many of the other songs follow the vibe of the “Soft Bulletin” looking at such elemental ideas as love, life, death, loneliness but never in a cynical, nihilistic way.  Certainly, the spacey, ecstatic ballad "Do You Realise" has to be one of the most beautiful and positive musings on death ever committed to record.

One thing I like about this album is that if you stripped most of these songs down to just acoustic guitar with bass and drums, they’d still be good songs.  The washes of sound, the bleeps and bloops, the sonic manipulation are all just icing (pink icing if you will) on the Lips’ cake.

Day 0890 - The Soft Bulletin

Flaming Lips "The Soft Bulletin" (1999)

The Lips had been mining experimental veins of musical exploration,  which could be seen to culminate with the "Zaireeka" album consisting of 4 discs designed to be played simultaneously on 4 different players.   Where to go from there?  Obviously the answer was to make a transcendent baroque pop album.

The Lips did it in their own way though, so interesting sonic manipulation is evident throughout more traditional instrumentation and lush arrangements.

The highlight for me is the mostly instrumental, wordless track "the Observer".    

 

"Feeling Yourself Disintergrate" starts with a repeated, ping-pong vocal somewhere between beatbox and scat that is then enveloped by treated keyboards, reverby vocals and a general warm blanket of music.  Despite its seemingly bleak title, the track in fact dwells on love, life and the universe in a dreamy, tripped out way.  That approach seems to be the bent of many of singer Wayne Coyne's lyrics: filling with hope instead of the cynicism and nihilism of some of his musical peers.

This trippy pop approach and psychedelic yet uplifting lyrics would go on to be further developed on follow-up "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots".