

- #The flaming lips yoshimi battles the pink robots how to#
- #The flaming lips yoshimi battles the pink robots series#
“So we’re making a really dense, fucking cool-sounding album, and it’s getting better and better. “A lot of the programmes and the apps and all the things that were just beginning to happen, in the second that they were happening, Dave Fridmann was on it,” Coyne recalled. With Fridmann himself hitting a peak across recent records by bands such as Mogwai, Mercury Rev and Sparklehorse, and his studio becoming better equipped by the month, the Lips were in the perfect place to realise their goal. We’re not gonna get Timbaland to make it. Wouldn’t that be fucking fun?” As the singer recalled for Record Collector, Fridmann more than agreed: “I think he secretly was like – and we’re gonna fuckin’ really do it. Handing Fridmann a Timbaland remix of a Madonna song, Coyne told the producer, “I think we’re gonna try to make a record like this. “It sounded like weird music disguised as music that could be on the radio”Īcross lengthy sessions in producer Dave Fridmann’s Tarbox Road Studios, in Cassadaga, an hour south of Buffalo, New York, The Flaming Lips availed themselves of advances in technology while they sought to harness their obsessions with sci-fi and Big Question themes – love, life, death and the human condition in a rapidly changing world – to a crossover sound that wouldn’t compromise their ambition. And it wasn’t what we wanted to make.” Listen to ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’ here.
#The flaming lips yoshimi battles the pink robots how to#
“We don’t really know how to make another one of those. “We didn’t want it to sound like The Soft Bulletin at all,” Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne told this author for an interview published in Record Collector magazine in October 2020. More than completing their self-appointed mission, the group re-emerged in the summer of 2002 with Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. With their audience growing in tandem with their critical standing, the Lips entered the 2000s set on matching their neo-psychedelic excursions with the sounds then taking cutting-edge pop and hip-hop into the charts. Their landmark ninth album, 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, had channelled private reckonings with grief into a cathartic outpouring of emotion hailed as that era’s Pet Sounds. But there’s no denying that it’s another boldly original work from one of music’s most artistically ambitious bands.As the 90s came to a close, The Flaming Lips staged an unlikely career turnaround, shifting from anarchic noiseniks to purveyors of sumptuous dream pop. Only time will tell if Yoshimi becomes as beloed as the group’s 1999’s orch-pop masterpiece The Soft Bulletin.
#The flaming lips yoshimi battles the pink robots series#
Hippie-dippie embraces artsy-fartsy once again as the Lips dish up a series of strummy, lysergic guitar-pop ballads ( It’s Summertime, Fight Test) and lush, expansive dreamscapes ( In the Morning of the Magicians, All We Have is Now), while other tracks ( One More Robot, Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell) see the group expanding their horizons with trip-hop beatboxes and chillout room vibes. (Hey, at least you can’t say you’ve heard that one before.) Partly inspired by the death of a Japanese fan, Yoshimi is part song cycle, part sound story, and part concept album about life, love, humanity, death, funerals, sunshine and, er, robots that fight humans in gladiator combat. Their 11th album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots - the title alone should be enough of a tipoff - is yet another bizarre, intriguing and sublimely wonderous journey to the edge of the universe and the centre of your mind. And every time, I’m wrong - including this time. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):Įvery time Oklahoma’s neo-psychedelic pop freaks The Flaming Lips put out an album, I think it can’t possibly be any weirder than their last one. This came out in 2002 – or at least that’s when I got it.
