Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots

For your consideration, some great mysteries of our time. The Bermuda Triangle. The Roswell Conspiracy. The assassination of JFK. The Flaming Lips still on Warner Brothers after ten years.

The Flaming Lips are the Terry Gilliams of rock ‘n’ roll, unholy Quixotics blowing raspberries at the inconceivable, mad Ahabs going full steam ahead over the horizon while their A&R man cries out, "You’re gonna need a bigger boat!" from the shores of sanity. The four CD set Zaireeka would’ve gotten any other act kicked out of the foyer before they even got to pitch it, but 1999’s The Soft Bulletin saved the Lips’ skins, a vast, shining monument to future-shocked gnostalgia that deservedly nabbed all that year’s garlands.

And now: Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, their latest high-concept surrealistic pillow fight between good and evil, between hyper-reality and altered states, between full-fat and low-tar electric dreams. You can take Yoshimi on face value as a song cycle (the acceptable term for concept album) about a cyberpunk cutie doing battle with killer robots, a kind of Judy Garland digimorphing into Lara Croft on Broadway - or, if that’s too much to swallow, you can treat the storyline as an allegory for a Japanese friend of the band who passed away before the recording of this opus, the automatons representing the terrifyingly non-negotiable evil of cancer cells, or of sickness in general, thus rendering this album as a sort of Magic & Loss for space rockers. I don’t care either way. The important thing is, when you remove the conceptual scaffolding, the song structures hold. And how: Wayne, Stephen and Michael can conjure melodies like Dali could dream, just as Dave Fridmann and Scott Booker know how to inflate those melodies into great hulking monoliths the size of Brazil.

After listening to this for a week I started re-reading Ray Bradbury stories, yarns like ‘The Kilimanjaro Device’ and ‘The Inspired Chicken Motel’. Maybe it’s the titles. More likely though, it’s the beautiful fusion of big-hearted sentiment with a utopian/dystopian vision. Tunes, no, movements like ‘Are You A Hypnotist?’, ‘Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell’ and the unbearably gorgeous ‘In The Morning Of The Magicians’ are all designed and storyboarded atop stop-start animation rhythms smeared in viscous digital ooze, while ‘Fight Test’ is ‘Father & Son’ by way of William Gibson. Then there’s the two panoramic parts of the title tune, which remind this listener of Neil Young’s Trans, not the songs so much as the subtext: a man using technology to try and communicate with his non-oral cerebral palsied son. So, when Coyne croons, "Feeling a synthetic kind of love..." you might wonder, do androids have wet dreams about electric sheep? Can you get a replicant up the shtick, and if so, what would the baby look like? And will Wayne ever play the theremin again?

Tune in again next album for the answer to this and other cosmic conundra. Meantime, dreamtime.