![]() ![]() "All We Have is Now," "It's Summertime" and "Are You a Hypnotist?" all wonderfully mix sunshine and melancholy.ĭrozd's arrangements are inspired, with some wonderfully elegant touches. It works particularly well with Coyne's "happiness makes you cry" ruminations. The mix of acoustic guitars, very bloopy analogue synthesizers, glitchy hip hop beats, and some magnificent basslines from Michael Ivins may be a sonic mix they've never bettered. Coyne has a lot more on his mind, and Drozd and Fridmann have a lot more sonic tricks up their sleeves. There's no other song on Yoshimi that mainlines to the heart the way "Do You Realize?" does, which is good because if it did it would be a Coldplay album. The flaming lips yoshimi battles the pink robots full#The Flaming Lips have never been simpler or more direct than on "Do You Realize?," the album's first single and the band's most well-known, most requested, and most played song that lays out relatable, heart-tugging platitudes with a soaring melody that is full of whoa-ohs and stonery, whoa-inducing Deep Thoughts like, "You realize the sun doesn't go down / It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round." Coyne's sincerity and vocal delivery, that wobbles like the keyboard strings that coat the song, keep things from getting too treacly. It's as if they took The Soft Bulletin's "Race for the Prize" and "Waitin' for a Superman," distilled them to their essence and made an entire record with those ideas. ![]() Yoshimi is actually a little less out-there than its predecessor, with simpler arrangements and more direct lyrics. They ponder the inner workings of the heart and mind, our place in the universe, love and mortality, elation and despair. The story, such as it is, wraps up in less than 20 minutes - with Boredoms' Yoshimi P-We providing some intense screaming along the way - before moving onto more familiar (and better) territory for them. Apart from the wonderful cover art painted by Coyne, and the first four songs (all great,) the plot is lost and the Lips never look back. Maybe that's why the album works so well. Wherever the idea actually came from.as concept albums go, honestly, Yoshimi is a little underbaked. ![]() "And I took eight hits of acid." Drozd replied, "Eight hits? That's a lot of acid." Coyne said "It seemed to work out." While that story certainly sounds plausible for a band whose song titles have included "The Ceiling Is Bendin'," "Guy Who Got A Headache And Accidentally Saves The World," "Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Despair," and "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate," Coyne later said in the same commentary that the eight hits of acid story was "the lie" he likes to tell, that he's actually not much of a drug person, and that the only thing LSD ever gave him was "diarrhea and brain damage." So how did they do it? "I was listening to your melody," Coyne said to bandmate Steven Drozd in a promotional commentary that was recorded for release events at record stores. I don't know any of these music business hot topics'." I have no idea what a cool video would be. "For better or worse, we've not tried to learn that much about how the music business works.It was purely us saying, 'I have no idea what they're going to play on the radio. "We made the Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots record, just really out of pure oblivion, and it really worked again," Wayne Coyne told ABC Australia. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was released July 16, 2002. ![]() How do you follow up a universally praised record? You make a concept album about a robot designed to kill that falls in love with its target that ends up being the biggest album of your career. After nearly two decades together as cultishly loved - mostly commercially ignored - psychedelic rock weirdos, Oklahoma's The Flaming Lips released The Soft Bulletin in 1999, a masterpiece that had some folks saying, "Wait, this is the 'She Don't Use Jelly Band'?" Sonically ambitious but loaded with pop melodies and thoughtful lyrics that most people could relate to, The Soft Bulletin might not have been as much of a surprise if people had the four CD players necessary to listen to their previous album, Zaireeka, but nonetheless it was a giant leap forward for the band and one of the great albums of the decade. ![]()
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