The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002)

The Flaming Lips sounds like the name an 80s band should have come up with. I shouldn't judge a band by its name, or an album by its cover. In some cases it's really hard not to.

I can however judge a band by the first 30 seconds of the first song on their album. "Fight Test" might be a decent light rocker, but it's way too noisy. On top of the twee vocals and easy listening acoustic guitar the Lips have over dubbed really heavy synth tracks that completely crush the rest of the song under their weight. I didn't even have the volume up half way and I still had to turn it down. The sound was so piercing and yet somehow crunchy.

Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots might just be a little too nerdy for me. All this talk about robots and how they have feelings... that stuff works better as a movie than as an indie rock album. I have to assume this is indie rock, because it's certainly not alternative rock and I can't think of any other genre of rock that was popular in the early aughts. I'm tempted to call this nerd rock, but I hate to create another subgenre just because of the lyrics. Although I might do that for the synthesized fart noises the Lips insist on overdubbing onto every track. If it weren't for those the album might sound pretty decent, instead it sounds like total shit.

"The Morning Of The Magicians" isn't too bad. I'd like it better as an instrumental without the vocalist straining to reach such obnoxiously high notes. I'd also like it without all the overdubs that sound like a synthesizer being played underwater. I'd also clean up the drum sound so it wasn't so crunchy. OK, maybe I didn't like it all that much. I like the idea of the song, the composition, the melody. The arrangement not so much. Also these songs are tending to have a lot of overdubbed applause.

To summarize, I felt Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots had plenty of neat musical ideas that were ruined by overwrought arrangements and way too many synthesized sound effects. And they never even told me if Yoshimi defeated the pink robots! 2 stars.