1) Fight Test; 2) One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21; 3) Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, pt. 1; 4) Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, pt. 2; 5) In the Morning of the Magicians; 6) Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell; 7) Are You a Hypnotist??; 8) It’s Summertime; 9) Do You Realize??; 10) All We Have Is Now; 11) Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)
Big ol' maximalist technicolour party about the frailty of life. Definitely among the 'safer' Flaming Lips albums, but it's honestly only good for the music involved.
As interesting as it is to observe their strange adventures, The Flaming Lips haven’t won me over. The stoned-out indie rock shenanigans of their early albums were rich in personality but listening to them comes with the same feeling that you get when a group of people in your company are laughing at an inside joke you don't know. Meanwhile, in their later years they seem to have take it upon themselves to be as weird as possible in a most self-consciously try-hard way possible. Their songs became 24 hours long and their release formats went from USB sticks inside gummi skulls to real skulls, but does anyone actually remember any of the music that was stored inside the gimmicks? In both cases, the music seems to play second fiddle to the aesthetics and not in a way strong enough to hit me.
But then there’s that curious phase in-between. The one where the band out of the blue reinvented themselves as a bizarre reimagining of a pop band, looking at the world in a whole different way than the rest of us yet who were capable to reach the heart of every single living soul - including my critical heart. The appearance of the now iconic animal costumes, zorb balls, confetti and space crafts. The music is both world-weary and out of this world, a celebration of life in all its uniqueness and expressing it through keyboard-heavy singalong melodies.
Despite its whimsical title and bright pink visuals, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is a very melancholy album. It’s riddled with existential questions, often makes a note about how insignificant we are in this universe and it’s downright obsessed with mortality. Even something as innocuous as the (almost) title track about a girl fighting robots has layers of this if you go along with the story that it was inspired by a fan’s battle with cancer, with the robots representing the cancer cells the protagonist fights against and takes vitamins for; this is, in fact, further supported by the stage musical inspired by the album, which takes this angle and goes with it completely. Or take the inarguable centrepiece of the album, “Do You Realize??” - an anthem the size of a small galaxy about how you will one day pass away and the rest of the world will move on.
But it doesn’t sound like that, and that’s what makes the album special. When the song bursts in angelic choirs, it becomes the most beautiful thing in the world and makes a point to note that while you will depart eventually, the rest of this beautiful life won’t be going anywhere. It’s like the light at the end of the tunnel envelops everything and makes you realise just how precious it is. It’s both melancholy yet incredibly uplifting, soothing and awestruck. It’s a whopper of a song - one of the all-time greats, even - but it’s not the only one of its like on Yoshimi and that’s what really makes the album a little special. The magic of the music on Yoshimi lies in its sense of the fantastic, a never-dimming wonder of everything around. The big ambient waves, space-age synthesizer melodies, Wayne Coyne’s otherworldly yet soft singing and the constant harmonising behind his lead vocals come together to create a sounder larger than life, totally amazed by everything yet so concerned about how it will all end. To call the album melancholy, or even bittersweet, sells it short - it’s a beautiful, soothing album of wide-eyed wonder and bliss. And while “Do You Realize??” exemplifies that the best, that bliss and magic also extends over to the other songs – “Fight Test”, “In the Morning of the Magicians” and “Are You a Hypnotist” in particular immerse themselves in that same enchantment to often breath-taking results.
It’s a shame about the two instrumentals because without them, this would be a near-perfect record. “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon” is fairly boring and closes the album with an ill-fittingly dull thud of an ending while “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots pt. 2” is a pointless mess of cacophonic screaming and crashing cymbals with no real value, which is generally ill-fitting to the album as a whole and sounds especially lacklustre compared to the excitingly quirky first part. Both of them commit the error of pulling the listener away from the surreal and lovely world the album weaves around itself, and when the album sells itself with the charm of that world any disturbances fall even more flat than they possibly should.
But that shouldn’t let you condemn the album too much. It is still a gorgeous listen, and a curious one at the same time: it’s one where the often tricky Flaming Lips abandoned their almost gimmick-like experimental/surrealist (call it however you like) tones and suddenly gained a sense of clarity. It’s almost like a religious awakening, suddenly finding yourself asking the big “why?” after years of wilderness and crazy benders. Only in The Flaming Lips’ case that clarity came in form of a bold pop album: existentialist for sure, but universal in its reach and intergalactic in its scope.
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