‘Trigger it’s exhausting to say what’s actual/If you understand how you are 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 comply with as much as the psychedelic oddballs’ true d’oeuvre, 1999’s The Smooth 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 to be visionary, particularly in relation to the unknowns that include AI and the best way the web dominates individuals’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 reduce up, diced and laid over a rhythmic groove that nearly seems like a beatbox, pitching analogue towards digital.
Most significantly, humanity in all its superb fallibility is ready towards pernicious, automated know-how, the particular ingredient that provides the album its phantasmagorical edge.
The beats would possibly emanate from machines, however they’re bleeding into the crimson because the hi-hats spit distortion – a choice made by the band in settlement with producer Dave Fridmann.
Even having undergone the total 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 typically. It’s the form of nuance solely people are able to understanding – at the very least for now.
In fact, the robots by no means stood an opportunity towards 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 sometime will die?’
With Fridmann’s swirling manufacturing and Coyne seemingly so tangible he would possibly 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 through Warner/Rhino.
