Blindspotting: Flaming Lips, "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots"

The Legacy: A classic — and perhaps the last — example of what can happen when a commercially underperforming act is given enough time and label patience to either find its stride or accidentally align with the zeitgeist, Flaming Lips kicked around on the fringes for a LONG time before finally striking flint to steel with the Beavis & Butt-Head-anointed "She Don't Use Jelly" in 1993. Because it was the early '90s, and program directors' appetite for quasi-tuneful gibberish was at an all-time high, Warner Bros. thought the next Lips album would produce even bigger hits, but instead, the band was stuffed back into the same closet occupied by Buzz Bin als0-rans like Hum, Tonic, and Dog's Eye View.

For a few years, anyway. Although 1995's Clouds Taste Metallic and 1997's pompously weird Zaireeka failed to provide the sales burst Warners was hoping for, things started to change for the Flaming Lips after the release of 1999's highly regarded The Soft Bulletin, which suggested the band was reaching "alternative elder statesmen" status even though the record itself failed to chart. The floodgates finally opened three years later with Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.

Like a number of albums that were overtly presented as concept albums, Yoshimi is allegedly actually something other than a concept album, at least according to aggravatingly bizarre frontman Wayne Coyne. I tend to think he doth protest too much, probably because the record's loose storyline evaporates a few songs in, but it doesn't matter much either way; your chances of "getting" this collection of songs are basically the same regardless of whether you can detect a coherent narrative structure.

More importantly, Yoshimi is more musically layered — and, in spots, more radio-friendly — than the Lips' earlier work. It largely continues the pivot away from traditionally guitar-forward rock begun with Bulletin, but folds in the machine-driven textures that were de rigueur at the time. As a result, it came as less of a surprise than it might have otherwise when the Yoshimi track "Do You Realize??" took on a second life as a soundtrack anthem for commercials, helping spur the album to the band's only gold certifications from the RIAA. (The song itself, although it didn't chart, was also certified.) Subsequent releases have bested Yoshimi's No. 50 peak — 2009's Embryonic, whose double-LP length is terrifying to contemplate, went Top 10 — but this era remains the height of the band's mainstream cultural penetration.

First Impressions: I'll get this out of the way right up front: I listened to Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots expecting to hate it, and I did not. I still think this band falls hard on the wrong side of the occasionally fuzzy line between being musically adventurous and simply indulging in weirdness for its own sake, but Yoshimi isn't a hard record to listen to.

That may or may not be a compliment. I've had this thing on repeat all day, and I still can't decide whether I'll ever want to hear it again after I'm done with this post. Taken as a whole, the album comes relatively close to replicating what it feels like during the last few seconds before the anesthesia kicks in — not an unpleasant sensation, but also one that's designed to get you from Point A to Point B without really remembering a fucking thing. It's colorful and weird and hazy as hell, and if you try to put a foot down or grab onto anything, you'll just fall right through.

For a lot of listeners, I reckon that's a strong selling point, and again, as musical laughing gas, Yoshimi pretty much does what it seems to set out to do, especially if you're willing to believe Coyne's insistence that it isn't trying to tell a story. Ultimately, however, I think I have to admit that it doesn't do a whole lot for me; if I wanted to listen to something this willfully diffuse, I'd play some ambient albums, not sign up to be led around by the nose through a demented elf's musical garden.

"Do You Realize??" is still pretty, though.

Favorite Song: I have to go with "Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell," because its first-gear robo-funk offers a nice change of pace from some of the album's less melodically pointed material. It sounds basically like every album Guster has released since 2006, which is a profoundly upsetting realization for me to make, but if I'm going back to a song from this record, it'll be that one.