Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Flaming Lips Zip

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I think it's safe to say that the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne is a genius, equal parts Thomas Edison and P.T. Like Edison, Coyne is a relentless tinkerer, a visionary experimenteur with a sci-fi fetish and a soft spot for odd technologies. And like Barnum, Coyne is a consummate showman-- the hand puppets, the boombox orchestras, the oddball short films, the radio-controlled headphones. In 1984, Coyne was just another Oklahoma dreamer with an amateurish psych-rock garage band and a duffel bag stuffed with thrift-store effects pedals; 18 years later, Coyne finds himself in the position of following up one of the most universally regarded albums since Pet Sounds. So let's just come right out and say it: after the one-two punch of Zaireeka and The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots is a bold and inventive work, brimming with ideas and sublime moments of brilliance. But it's also unfocused and top-heavy, a concept album about robots and karate that, somewhere along the line, strays into languorous, contemplative songs about mortality and death. Nor does Yoshimi always put the Lips' best foot forward-- though Dave Fridmann's production dazzles, the overdriven drums and orchestral swoons that characterized The Soft Bulletin are often lost in a busy mesh of programmed beats and lazy synthstrings.

The album gets off to a rollicking start with the winning 'Fight Test,' a glossy rumination on the call to duty-- whether that's standing up to a playground bully or, as the Lips would have it, an army of rebellious androids bent on world domination. 'If it's not now, then tell me when would be the time that you would stand up and be a man?' Coyne sings over a thick buzz of keyboards, bass and an almost hip-hop rhythm, offsetting his resolve in the refrain: 'I don't know how a man decides what's right for his own life/ It's all a mystery.' It's a stunning pop song-- easily this album's 'Waitin' for a Superman'-- with an intensely memorable melody and the conflict of Coyne's internal dialogue resonating positively on many levels.

Yoshimi takes its first left turn with 'One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21,' a slippery detour into glitch augmented with falsetto choruses, reverberating vocals and haywire surges of digital clickery. 'Unit 3000-21 is warming/ Makes a humming sound when its circuits duplicate emotions,' Coyne sings over a simple bass figure and ambient tones before the song explodes in a burst of overdriven clockwork. It's a dizzying, disorienting sound-- but once the novelty wears off, you've gotta admit it sounds a bit like Steely Dan.

'Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (Part 1)' rides a simple melody and ridiculously infectious butt-beat as it sets the stage for the album's short-lived 'concept'-- some entertaining nonsense about an army of Japanese girls training to take on the salmon-hued robots at a kung-fu compound right out of Enter the Dragon. In the chorus, Coyne plays call-and-response with a malevolent synth burble that sounds like a malevolent R2-D2. Its rollercoaster companion, 'Yoshimi (Part 2),' scales a slinky, ascending wall of farty synth and distant Japanese babble before the bottom falls out, rocketing into chaotic instrumental breakdowns each a shade more intense than the last. It's the closest the Lips have come to writing straight videogame music, complete with crowd noises and bloodcurdling screams (courtesy of the Boredoms' Yoshimi Yokota). And this is where Yoshimi makes its first misstep, on the sleepy 'In the Morning of Magicians.' Though punctuated with bursts of instrumental energy, the arrangement quickly devolves into a thick lite-FM syrup.

'What is love and what is hate, and why does it matter?' Coyne wonders over a flitty symphony of Muzak strings. Again, the production is flawless-- I especially dig the wavering tape-speed fluctuations on the background vocals-- but the song throws the album into a downbeat, overly philosophical malaise from which it never fully recovers. What happened to Yoshimi again? What pink robots? Yoshimi shines again with the superior 'Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell,' which pits more existential lyrics over a far more satisfying collage of sounds (vocal samples, snippets of mellotron, a lumbering bass). 'I was waiting on a moment, but the moment never came,' croons Coyne, echoing the issues of readiness and bravery 'Fight Test' raised, but also betraying Yoshimi's greatest weakness: the moment never comes.

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, The Flaming Lips' long awaited follow-up to 1999's the Soft Bulletin. Guest artist Yoshimi P-we plays with psyche-noise-experimental group the Boredoms & leads her own band OOIOO.