When it comes to The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev I am always confronted with a chicken and egg scenario, I've always felt the highly acclaimed and hugely popular Deserter’s songs was as much a Flaming Lips album as it is a Mercury Rev album. That style and sound belonged to the Lips but then David Fridmann of Mercury Rev produced most of the Lips albums and Jonathan Donahue (Mercury Rev’s vocalist) used to be their sound engineer back in ‘87 and even played with the band for a while in ‘88 and ‘89, recording ‘Hit to Death in the Future Head’ with them. So I suppose in a way the sound probably belongs to both although Mercury Rev are certainly enjoying more fame.

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is the Lips tenth studio album and is partly inspired by the sudden death of a Japanese girl who travelled with the band for a while when they were touring Japan. The title of the album is a reference to a different Japanese girl Yoshimi P-we, the drummer with The Boredoms, who is described by the band off the record as a marvelously kind and beautiful woman, a musician of extraordinary talent and uniqueness (she is the leader of her own band "OOIOO.") but on the record she’s a black belt in karate who defends her city against the evil pink robots.

The record opens with the funky ‘Fight test’ which borrows the melody from Cat Steven’s ’Father and Son’. The song deals with the philosophical question of pacifism, and although it concludes that ‘it’s (life) all a mystery’ he does express regret at not defending himself in a previous encounter ’I’m a man and not a boy and there are things you can’t avoid’.

The album then quickly changes course to deal with killer robots but something has gone wrong and ‘it’s circuits have duplicated emotions ....one more robot learns to be something more than a machine’. The poor robot falls in love with Yoshimi (unknowns to her) and cannot bring itself to kill her. This is followed by the gorgeous title track which is a tribute to our super heroin Yoshimi. She does indeed defeat the robot in the next track in a gladiator style showdown although she herself is left perplexed as to how easy it was in the end.

Having destroyed the evil robots the album moves along and the remaining songs deal with death, the brevity and precarious nature of life, and the concept of love with a sound that could possibly be described as Neil Young meets Pink Floyd (albeit somewhere in outer-space). ’It’s Summertime’ is a song of encouragement to the grieving sisters of their Japanese friend.

What truly sets the Flaming Lips apart from almost everyone else is that they can write about this kind of subject matter intelligently and sensitively but still retain a sense of humour, and despite the bleakest of subject matter they always retain hope. Musically the album is of the high standard we’ve come to expect from them and even when they are at their most experimental the music is still great. Rock on the Lips!
8/10