‘Trigger it’s onerous to say what’s actual/Whenever you know how you’re feeling,’ emotes Flaming Lips chief Wayne Coyne on One Extra Robotic/Sympathy 3000-21 from Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots.
As soon as seen because the well-executed observe as much as the psychedelic oddballs’ true d’oeuvre, 1999’s The Mushy Bulletin, the Lips’ tenth now eclipses its predecessor as their go-to masterpiece. Launched in 2002, this quirky idea album about pink droids and karate now seems visionary, particularly in relation to the unknowns that include AI and the way in which the web dominates folks’s lives.
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots presents a number of battlegrounds: the tangible versus the surreal, the bodily and the metaphysical. The guitars are minimize up, diced and laid over a rhythmic groove that just about feels like a beatbox, pitching analogue in opposition to digital.
Most significantly, humanity in all its superb fallibility is ready in opposition to pernicious, automated expertise, the particular ingredient that offers the album its phantasmagorical edge.
The beats may emanate from machines, however they’re bleeding into the pink because the hi-hats spit distortion – a choice made by the band in settlement with producer Dave Fridmann.
Even having undergone the complete Dolby Atmos remedy for this Blu-ray audio reissue 22 years later, the rhythm tracks stay defiantly lo-fi palimpsests, reassuring us that wrongness can really feel so proper generally. It’s the sort of nuance solely people are able to understanding – at the least for now.
In reality, the robots by no means stood an opportunity in opposition to Yoshimi (impressed by Yoshimi P-We of Japanese noise outfit the Boredoms) or inveterate existentialist Coyne, reaching out to his viewers with childlike marvel: ‘Do you realise that happiness makes you cry?’ he sings on Do You Notice? ‘Do you realise that everybody you understand sometime will die?’
With Fridmann’s swirling manufacturing and Coyne seemingly so tangible he may attain out and contact the listener’s face, it feels daringly emotional – one thing the robots won’t ever be capable to comprehend.
The 2024 version of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots is on sale now by way of Warner/Rhino.
