Plan9 Music

Reviews:

How do you follow up one of the greatest records of the past decade? If you're the Flaming Lips, it means ripping a hole into the very fabric of the space-time continuum and lining your pockets with as many elusive secrets of the universe as possible. It's time to face facts: 1999's majestic The Soft Bulletin was probably the closest the Lips will ever come to making a "straight" record. The real Flaming Lips-and not the super-intelligent robots that captured them and held them hostage during the recording of The Soft Bulletin - can't settle down long enough to play by the rules.

Mind you, frontman Wayne Coyne insists that Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots is not a "concept record." And he's telling the truth to a certain degree; it's a far cry from orchestrating a boom-box symphony or stretching the limits of stereophonic sound with a four-discset. But Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is conceptual, just not in the way that past Flaming Lips releases have favored sonic abstraction. Coyne spins a narrative thread with the record's first four songs: it's the future, there's an irrepressibly cute little Japanese girl named Yoshimi, and she's mankind's only hope for standing up to the threat of an army of tyrannical robots. The thread is dropped after Yoshimi bests the Pink Robots on the fourth song, but the rest of the record plays out like variations on Coyne's favorite theme of disconnection.

Some of it ("Fight Test" and "Do You Realize?") is unquestionably excellent, while some of it (aural fantasies like "In the Morning of the Magicians") barely lives up to the group's impossibly high standards. Which brings us back to the original question: how the hell do you follow up a record like The Soft Bulletin? Well, if you're the Flaming Lips, you don't-you simply settle for one-half of a great record and the comfort of knowing that the other half is still more imaginative than most of what's out there.