CD Odyssey Disc 415: Flaming Lips

It’s the middle of a great weekend, I got paid yesterday, the sun is shining, and today I played my first game of Ultimate in over a month.  Life is good.

Disc 415 is…Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

Artist: The Flaming Lips

Year of Release: 2002

What’s up with the Cover?  An artistic depiction of diminutive Japanese martial artist Yoshimi, battling a pink robot.  This is not my kind of art, but I did call for a big art piece cover in my last review, so here it is.

How I Came To Know It: This was a gift for my birthday ten years ago from Jennifer and Cody.  They also got me Belle & Sebastian’s “The Boy with the Arab Strap,” which gets a lot more play, but both were appreciated.

How It Stacks Up:  I have just this one Flaming Lips album, and no plans to get another, so it doesn’t really stack up.

Rating:  3 stars

Don’t prejudge an album simply because the last time you listened to it your expectations weren’t met.  If you’re taking the time to give an album a full listen, then you owe it to yourself to listen with an open heart.  I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating, because the Odyssey keeps surprising me with my own opinion, and how it changes over time.

Which brings us to “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” (hereafter referred to as “Yoshimi”), a concept album from the Flaming Lips that simply did not float my boat when I first heard it ten years ago.  Since then it has sat on our CD shelves and only rarely been taken down – usually by Sheila who likes it a lot more than me.

When I first heard this record it sounded overwrought, overproduced and generally unremarkable.  Part of this reaction was my knowing in advance that it was a concept album, telling the tale of diminutive city worker/karate expert Yoshimi saving mankind from robots.  I love concept albums, and I hold them to a higher standard.  I didn’t think that “Yoshimi” met the test, and nothing fails so spectacularly as a poorly constructed concept album.

On this listen, I had a similar reaction.  The music is futuristic enough sounding, but the organs, synth and weird drum machine sounds aren’t terribly exciting, and mostly serve as filler.  The album has a lot of filler tracks that are basically a cross between dance music and lounge, and are inoffensive – even well-constructed – but ultimately forgettable.  I think a concept album’s songs each need to contribute to the story better than these ones did, at least for me.

However, when I revisited the album this time, my expectations had been reversed.  I expected it to be as bad a record as I remembered it (cognitive dissonance is a bitch, my friends).  Instead, this time I found myself genuinely enjoying some of the tracks as individual songs with surprisingly strong melodies I hadn’t heard on my first introduction to the record.

“Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots pt. 1” is a ridiculous title for a song (it enraged me the first time around as well) but it is also a beautiful little track, with genuine emotion, and even a little humour (we are told that our hero is ‘taking lots of vitamins’ to help prepare her for the battle with the robots.

I also grooved on the opening track, “Fight Test,” despite its excessively artificial ending of weird sounds.  When it sticks to its own tune, it delivers a mixture of high melodies and expressions of self-doubt that reminded me of a Cat Stevens song, gone electronica.  In fact, there are sections of the melody in “Fight Test” that is remarkably similar to Stevens’ song “Father and Son.”

And then, of course, there is the enduring classic from the record, “Do You Realize?” which is an anthem for life on earth.  While discussing this album last night, someone told me that she wanted this song played at her funeral, and listening to it I can appreciate how great a choice it would be for such an occasion:

“Do you realize – that happiness makes you cry?

Do you realize – that everyone you know, someday, will die?

Instead of saying all of your goodbyes

Let them know you realize that life goes fast

It’s hard to make the good things last

You realize the sun doesn’t go down

It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning ‘round.”

This song is anthemic and while it uses a lot of trite expressions, it uses them well, with soaring overdubbed vocals demanding that we take some time and look around.  As Ferris Bueller tells us, life moves pretty quickly, and you just might miss it if you don’t.

The music on “Yoshimi” is atmospheric and unearthly, and it has a lot of odd sounds going off that contribute to the unearthly quality.  There are places where it sounds like the Flaming Lips are trying to emulate Beck or Radiohead and mostly those efforts come up short.  When they stick to their own unique sound they do better, and deliver some surprisingly simple and perfect melodies under all that fuzzy production.  More surprisingly, the more I listened to these songs, the more I didn’t want to change the fuzzy production, quite contrary to my first reaction.

Does this record deserve the amount of fawning-over that it receives from music critics and devotees of the band alike?  Probably not – there is an awful lot of fawning involved.  Is it a solid album nonetheless?  It took me a while, but I do realize now that it is.  Consider me converted, at least partially.

Best tracks:  Flight Test, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1, Do You Realize?