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EDIT INFOThe Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
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Album Details
- Artist: The Flaming Lips
- Album: Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
- Label: Warner
- Year of Release: 2002
- ME Rating:
- Reviewed by: dscanland on 2003-03-30
RecommendThe age old question: how does a band follow-up a masterpiece? Yes, I would step out on a limb and say that The Flaming Lips Soft Bulletin was indeed a masterpiece and a career high for the tried and true band. The band has found that they can create some special music when they use producer Dave Fridmann so they choose him again fro Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. This album reaches starward and into the future for some answers and while they may not find any, they have provided a great soundtrack for the spacey intuitions. The ultimate theme running throughout the album is good vs. evil. The opening track on Yoshimi is "Flight Test"? which sounds almost like the lyrical style was lifted from Cat Steven's "Father and Son"?. The music is brilliant and the lyrics maintain a sense of humour through the entire album even on darker tracks like "All We Have Is Now". Yoshimi may not be as immediately enjoyable as The Soft Bulletin but after repeated listens you start to appreciate the brilliance that the Flaming Lips members possess. They reach out as far as Radiohead but keep the listeners as number one, never leaving them behind.
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on 2011-10-09 CharlesMartel Said:
I know people who adore this album. People who can wax lyrical about the beauty and sublimity of " Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" . When they do, I feel left out of the conversation. No matter how many times I hear this, and believe me I have heard this a lot, it singularly fails every time to rattle my cage.
It starts off OK with " Fight Test" but then it goes rapidly downhill. "In the Morning of the Magician " is so repetitive that it becomes annoying, especially as the background noise being repeated endlessly is just noise. " All We Have Now " is utterly depressing, but not even positively utterly depressing if you know what I mean, in the sense that you are sharing your depression with others and are therefore uplifted somehow by the knowledge.
Perhaps it was never going to get me off on the right foot for as a generality I am less than impressed with most concept albums. But this is a concept album which seems to lack a concept at times. The idea of some cutesy little kid taking on the evil robots may seem to have some naive appeal, but any message therein is lost. The robots are at times warm and fuzzy, and aren't we all just hunky-dory on our endlessly spinning world.
Actually, no, I'm not. As they say themselves, everyone I know is going to die some day and the prospect of that does not make me feel any better. But then I realise, these guys are not serious. This hippie-trippy neo-psychedelic shit is just a pretence, and the more you listen to this, the more you realise that this is alternating morose, sentimental, melodramatic, always cloying pretentiousness. Weak tunes and a background of abstract noises wrapped around a poorly enunciated theme is not something which is going to make me sit up and listen.
Each time I hear this I dread it. I get it played all the time to me and it wears me out. Thankfully, though, I have got to the point when can blot it out to the extent that it no longer sticks in my head and irritates me like it used to. Yet I still dread those days down the pub when the talk of music turns to the tribulations of little Yoshimi.
Maybe I should get some new friends. I've said it before and will say it again, bloody Pitchfork has a lot to answer for.
Rating: 3/10
