the flaming lips yoshimi battles the pink robots

The melody and arrangement are so buoyant, it’s safe to suspect that massive swaths of people have never even noticed that they’re singing along with an exceedingly tender lyric about accepting death. “Do You Realize?,” in particular, is just about perfect. The songs-even instrumental passages which might be filler is less careful hands-are indelible. The touchstones are pretty standard - Beatles, Beach Boys, maybe a smattering of Spiritualized, and myriad French pop ticklers both modern and vintage - but ultimately, it never really sounds like anyone but The Flaming Lips, and the best version of them at that. Whether you cared about the storyline or not, it was hard to deny that Yoshimi found the band at the height of their powers, delivering a filler-free collection of focused, lovely earworms. How, then, did an album this weird, this niche-sounding, become a favorite of critics, indie rockers, college kids, and just about everyone else? You could posit all kinds of theories, but the clearest answer is simple: it’s those melodies. In short, this was not an album poised for the mass market.

Indeed, the Flaming Lips were the band that most of your favorite bands loved, but they’d been effectively discarded by the mainstream as a goofy one-hit wonder less than a decade earlier (though, of course, they’d rebounded considerably with Yoshimi’s critically beloved precursor, The Soft Bulletin). It’s a meticulous studio production piece written and performed by a not-so-young indie/alt-rock band that had already spent two decades in “should be bigger” territory. Let’s lay it out, shall we? Yoshimi is a noisy psych-pop concept record about a young Japanese woman fending off evil robots, with a smattering of songs about mortality for good measure. In practice, it’s about as universal a record as has been made in the last two decades. It got played virtually every day, and even I, the resident curmudgeon/contrarian, got into it. It was one of the few records that had the approval of the whole music department staff, from the pompadoured blues guitarist and the boomer-aged Beatles fan to the guy who co-coordinated the local hipster dance party. Alongside Kid A, Yoshimi stands as one of the most progressive and inventive “rock” records of the 00s, fleshed out with synthesizers, sampling, Moog basslines (long before it was de riguer) and spacey atmosphere, which is brought back to earth by Coyne’s raspy Oklahama warbling.I first became acquainted with Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots while working at a Border Books & Music in Ann Arbor, Michigan the year it was released. On what is described as a very loose concept album, Lips mastermind Wayne Coyne manages to touch on some very legit and relatable topics, musing philosophically on adulthood and mortality with lines like “I don't know how a man decides what is right for his own life, it's all a mystery” and “do you realize that everyone you know someday will die,” all under the veil of the ridiculous spectacle that loosely connects the tracks: a tiny Japanese woman facing off against giant pink robots. The result is a multi-faceted record that was easily a decade before its time, lacing their trademark psych arrangements with elements of ambient (“Sympathy 3000-21”), blunted hip-hop (“Yoshimi” part 1 & 2), dreampop (“In The Morning Of The Magicians”), krautrock (“All We Have Is Now,” “Approaching Pavonis Moons”) and downtempo (“Are You A Hypnotist?”, “Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell,” “One More Robot”). The Lips delve deeper into this experimental zone on Yoshimi, with the studio as their main instrument, basically just throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks.

now! Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots was a huge leap for The Flaming Lips, initially known for slacker rock singalongs like “She Don’t Use Jelly” before moving into grandiose, over-budget, high-concept self-flagellation ( Zaireeka), eventually hitting their stride on the acclaimed and atmospheric Soft Bulletin.

Cartridge Headshells / Alignment / Cleaners

The flaming lips yoshimi battles the pink robots