The Soft Bulletin (1999)

If Wikipedia is to be believed, this ninth album from the Flaming Lips is their masterpiece. Dig a little deeper and you find the people making the claim are Amazon verified purchasers, but whatever. That's Wikipedia for you! The Soft Bulletin and the album that followed were also the high point of the trio's fame, for those inclined to embrace or reject on that basis. That puts them basically on the rise here. But I wish someone would make a case for this album, which always seems to come up short for me. Actually, I'll say that one song at a time listened to closely can be rewarding—that makes it workable anyway in a multi-CD shuffle type of mode. (Maybe in that regard it merits the comparisons to Pet Sounds, which I sometimes suspect have more to do with the theremin.) The moody brood of "What Is the Light?" and the soothing swamp of "The Observer." The plangent tender sadness of "The Spiderbite Song." The screaming glories of "The Gash." The aching throb of "Race for the Prize," the album opener and one of the two singles. The Peter Mokran mix of the other single, "Waitin' for a Superman," which hums with a bracing natural sweetness. Natural sweetness, in fact, is one of the band's enduring and greatest strengths. All this points to what I love most about the album that came next and my favorite by them, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, a one-of-a-kind that proceeds out of children's fantasies but remarkably with almost no cloying sentimentalities. Just the weirdness and the goodness—and so beautiful. I think my problem with the Flaming Lips might be that they're good at things which don't naturally coexist. They have a penchant for psychedelicized studio wonkery, with harsh edges that scrape at your head, which famously produced Zaireeka, a 4-CD album in which all four discs are intended to be played simultaneously. They have a reputation as a great live act—I'm sorry I never saw them in the '90s. They're not afraid of noise. And yet they can write the sweetest pop confections. In the songwriting they appear to act as a unit as all songs are credited equally to the band's three principles, Wayne Coyne, Steven Drozd, and Michael Ivins. Or maybe my problem is that drummer Drozd's playing is so intrusive, too loud and ornate and too often into the middle of everything. Obviously this is as intended—a feature not a bug. So I'll take my bad with my good. Maybe it bolsters the rock bona fides to have all that random booming and stamping going on, or something, but it's wearying. I'm sticking with Yoshimi.

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002)

I followed along vaguely through the '90s with the Flaming Lips, Oklahoma's greatest rock 'n' roll band. Clouds Taste Metallic, in 1995 nearly 10 years from their origins, was where I climbed on board. I attended a listening party a couple years later for the Zaireeka box (four CDs with identical track sequencing but varying mixes intended to be played simultaneously on four strategically distributed stereos). Derived the requisite appreciation of The Soft Bulletin. Then this, so confounding in the suffocating slow-melt of its surface textures, a candy-colored confection so sweet in its best moments it gives you a cavity, a rubbery resilient thing filled with soaring spaces that lumbers about like an elephant. A kind of hallucination, or Disney cartoon feature, from beginning to end. Of course it is perfectly ridiculous in the central conceit of its concept—something about a Japanese girl and malevolent robots, "those evil-natured robots / They're programmed to destroy us"—which is as intended, mostly beside the point anyway. Tracks such as the title song "Pt. 1" or "Do You Realize??" or "Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon" are almost perfectly irresistible on early exposure, amazing, swooning music, with melodies and arrangements that spread slowly like pink haze in sunset across the stratosphere, carried easily by Wayne Coyne's shades-of-Neil-Young quavering vocals and the huge bottoms of production. In the end, I'm not sure how well it all holds up, however. My complaint at the time of Zaireeka (along with its implicit homework assignment of assembling four CD players in one room and figuring out a way to start them all at once, and oh yeah, it was sold as an expensive box set too) was that the Flaming Lips tended for me to be an acquired taste, music that yielded up more the more one became familiar with it, and how was one supposed to pay adequate study to such a difficult project of even hearing it at all? With Yoshimi it's as if they went to the other extreme, creating bubblegum music for instant infatuation, sacrificing the depths that had accompanied the earlier work. Such a conundrum. In fact, I'm not positive even now that Yoshimi isn't still capable of eventually offering up something more memorable than its only temporarily diverting pleasures: plangent synthesizer figures, catchy melodies, and an occasional aching sense of some ineffable beyond. I just haven't found it yet.