In a recent interview, Flaming Lips front man Wayne Coyne asserted his belief that every Christmas movie should have a little It's A Wonderful Life in it. It's an illuminating sentiment that sheds light on the music of one of America's most consistently visionary and rewarding bands.
Frank Capra's classic Christmas movie, starring people's hero Jimmy Stewart, is the archetypal Capra film: a 'feel-good' tradition which has held a vicelike grip over Hollywood ever since but which, you sense, really meant something once upon a time. And, it really means something to Wayne Coyne and The Flaming Lips. Because 'Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots' in many ways parallels James Stewart's battle against Lionel Barrymore's Building And Loan Society and his triumph over the urge to take his own life. The film opens with Stewart, standing on a bridge amidst escalating personal and financial problems, contemplating suicide. His triumph over death, facilitated by a kindly angel who waltzes him back through his time on earth and reminds him of his unique achievements as an individual, is roughly the experience that sits at the heart of the revitalised Lips of 'The Soft Bulletin' and 'Yoshimi...'
Developing the theme explored on 'Feeling Yourself Disintegrate' - the finest moment of 1999's unparalleled 'The Soft Bulletin' in which Coyne addressed the impossibility of fully appreciating life without firstly acknowledging the totality of death - 'Yoshimi...' extends its 'born-again' worldview until it is positively beaming in the face of mortality. In 'Do You Realize??', the dependency of happiness upon sister sadness is brutally juxtaposed ("do you realise that happiness makes you cry?") and the transience of beauty, love and death are, like the experience of feeling oneself disintegrate, broken down to their molecular truths ("do you realise we're floating in space?").
In 'All We Have Is Now' a man "from the future" appears to our hero - in his own likeness - with insights from a world beyond ours, warning: "you and me were never meant to be part of the future." With this portent of doom comes the realisation (a key human experience throughout this album) that "all we have is now", that we must live our lives for the present and thus defy death.
After the perfect symphonic psychedelia of 'The Soft Bulletin' it can't have been a simple task putting together this album but the tension shows only in the uneasy fit between the opening 'concept' or 'Yoshimi' half of the album and the closing section in which Coyne returns his attention to this 'joyous' juxtaposition of life in the face of death. The two albums are very different of course. Lacking the freedom of 'The Soft Bulletin' - the near free jazz qualities of 'Feeling Yourself Disintegrate' and 'What Is The Light?' - the Lips opt for tightly honed pop songs. But, this being no ordinary band, 'pop' here does not come in the guise of easy Brian Wilson-alikes but instead turns every contemporary sonic trick available to the task of rewriting the psychedelic pop songbook.
Producer Dave Fridmann and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd pull on R&B, electronica, house music even, for a tightly knit production sound that reigns in the massive walls of acoustic guitar, strings and show tune largesse that occasionally threaten to drown Coyne's exquisitely fragile vocal. The John Bonham-atron that provided crashing drums on 'The Soft Bulletin' has been rewired, its ports stuffed with Timbaland chips and on tracks like 'Are You A Hypnotist??', drum patterns cruise seamlessly from the standard to throw up thrilling glimpses of stuttering reverberation.
Steven Drozd may just be one of the most talented and visionary musicians of his generation and as for Coyne, his is a musical imagination of embarrassing scope that can achieve impossibly rewarding feats: simultaneously conveying an unashamedly Capraesque vision of humanity whilst remaining defiantly left-of-centre. And, the quest for the archetypal song - something incorporating the universal appeal of 'Happy Birthday' and the wonder of 'Over The Rainbow' presumably - continues to drive the band as the album total enters double figures. Incredibly, 'Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots' is a record that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 'The Soft Bulletin', refining that album's themes and defiantly charging into unchartered musical territories. Another masterpiece.
