‘Cause it’s hard to say what’s real/When you know the way you feel,’ emotes Flaming Lips leader Wayne Coyne on One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21 from Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots.
Once seen as the well-executed follow up to the psychedelic oddballs’ true d’oeuvre, 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, the Lips’ 10th now eclipses its predecessor as their go-to masterpiece. Released in 2002, this quirky concept album about pink droids and karate now looks visionary, especially in relation to the unknowns that come with AI and the way the internet dominates people’s lives.
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots presents several battlegrounds: the tangible versus the surreal, the physical and the metaphysical. The guitars are cut up, diced and laid over a rhythmic groove that almost sounds like a beatbox, pitching analogue against digital.
Most importantly, humanity in all its glorious fallibility is set against pernicious, automated technology, the special ingredient that gives the album its phantasmagorical edge.
The beats might emanate from machines, but they’re bleeding into the red as the hi-hats spit distortion – a decision made by the band in agreement with producer Dave Fridmann.
Even having undergone the full Dolby Atmos treatment for this Blu-ray audio reissue 22 years later, the rhythm tracks remain defiantly lo-fi palimpsests, reassuring us that wrongness can feel so right sometimes. It’s the kind of nuance only humans are capable of understanding – at least for now.
In truth, the robots never stood a chance against Yoshimi (inspired by Yoshimi P-We of Japanese noise outfit the Boredoms) or inveterate existentialist Coyne, reaching out to his audience with childlike wonder: ‘Do you realise that happiness makes you cry?’ he sings on Do You Realize? ‘Do you realise that everyone you know someday will die?’
With Fridmann’s swirling production and Coyne seemingly so tangible he might reach out and touch the listener’s face, it feels daringly emotional – something the robots will never be able to comprehend.
The 2024 edition of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots is on sale now via Warner/Rhino.
