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".

Day 0833 - Antichrist Superstar

Marilyn Manson "Antichrist Superstar" (1996) - got it

I actually found it a little difficult to revisit this one.   I picked it up when I was a teenager, and as with a lot of this sort of angry, nihilistic, twisted music it was a good release for me when I was going through a whole lot of my own stuff.   The off-shoot of that is that this music is now largely tied to some pretty uncomfortable memories.

Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor had taken the band under his wing and produced their first couple of releases.   He initially helmed the sessions for Antichrist Superstar too, but was around less in the second half of the process due to his commitments working on David Lynch's "Lost Highway" soundtrack.

The album still has a NIN 'Downward Spiral' vibe to it though with crunchy guitar riffs, roomy drums, bleakness and a touch of ambient treatment to some of the arrangements.   The album starts full pelt with propulsive metal of "Irresponsible Hate Anthem" before seguing into the successful single "The Beautiful People" with its industrial-meets-tribal drumming and simple but effective guitar riffs.

Much of the album has a beaten, feral intensity to it, but the brakes are applied in a couple of places, most noticeably the melodic "Cryptorchid" with its squelchy beats and creepy synths, and album closer (save for the 80+ tracks of silence and the hidden track at the end) "Man that you fear" which almost has a creepy post-apocalyptic triphop vibe to it, like someone trying to emulate Portishead except that person is a crazed serial killer and is unable to hide that in the music.

Musically it is as strong a rock album as you could hope (though trimming a track or two wouldn't harm it).   Apparently there's some lyrical chain throughout the album so that it's kind of a concept album/rock opera, but I never really paid too much attention to that.  All I know is that at a certain time in my life it was the right album for where I was at, but I don't give it many listens these days.