New Flaming Lips

The Flaming Lips' incomparable 1999 album The Soft Bulletin found hickster prophet Wayne Coyne interested in life's mundanities like never before. For every image of interstellar travelers and earthbound messengers hoisting the sun upon their backs, there was one of quotidian duty. "They're just human with/wives and children," Coyne sang of the two scientist-subjects of "Race for the Prize." Later, on "Suddenly Everything Has Changed," Coyne was moved to rhapsodize about household chores: "Putting all the vegetables away/That you bought at the grocery store today."

But Coyne has (for the most part) left his earthly concerns behind, and with the band's astounding new Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots he has steered the Oklahoma trio back toward the farthest reaches of the solar system. In their 20th year of existence, the Lips are still charting an orbit as wonderfully fucked up as any band in America. Since producing The Soft Bulletin, Dave Fridmann has worked with Sparklehorse, Mercury Rev and Luna, but he is peerless when teaming with Coyne et al. Under his oversight, Yoshimi is driven by the same soaring harmonies and off-kilter string arrangements that propelled Bulletin to the top of countless year-end best-of lists in '99. Again, it's all anchored by multi-instrumentalist Steve Drozd's idiosyncratic drumming and Coyne's Okie crooning.

This is best heard on the album's title track. In true Coyne fashion, it's a weird and gorgeous little song about a female karate master who is assigned the duty of saving her city from a team of "evil-natured robots." "They're programmed to destroy us," Coyne warbles over start-stop acoustic guitar and an occasional interruption from the metallic-sounding voice of a soon-to-be-vanquished cyborg. "She's gotta be strong to fight them/So she's takin' lots of vitamins."

"Yoshimi" bleeds directly into one of the eminently listenable instrumental tracks the Lips have been experimenting with since they got together in 1983. The cymbal-heavy "Yoshimi...pt.2" serves as the score to the film in Coyne's mind?a woman screams and howls at the glowering robots before laying them to waste. Call it aural science fiction.

"Do You Realize??" may be the most straightforward of the album's 11 tracks. Apparently it was inspired by the death of a friend. His voice climbs ever higher as he wonders about contentment and mortality. "Do you realize?that happiness makes you cry?" he asks. "Do you realize?that everyone you know someday will die?"

The record's most ambitious track is titled "In the Morning of the Magicians," a six-plus-minute opus that wavers between emotional dislocation and hopefulness. But the most inspired work here, the song on which it is again clear that the Lips are perhaps the best band in America, is the beautifully inscrutable "Are You a Hypnotist??" Unlike some of the best Lips efforts, which rise ever so slowly from muted beginnings, "Hypnotist" begins with a flourish: a crescendo of rising operatic voices that after a few seconds give way to perfectly weird strings, synth and an irresistible drumbeat. Coyne again turns to the far out and the unknown for lyrical inspiration, but he smartly brings it all back home: "I have been tricked again/Into forgiving you/What is this?? Are you some kind of hypnotist?"

The Flaming Lips might be as influential as any band in the world, and Yoshimi is a good reminder why: Coyne is simply the most consistently inventive figure in American popular music.