AOTW: Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots

This album created by The Flaming Lips tells a story of a girl, Yoshimi who, as the title says, battles pink robots. Influenced by early Japanese robot culture, the album uses animeic (anime like) story elements that give a deep plot to this interesting tale, all done in music.

Yoshimi is a female soldier, in charge of defending her world from and advancing robot threat. She succeeds in her goal but after the war, she finds a robot and falls in love with it.

As expected with an album about a robot there is a lot of synthesizers. Heavily in the electronic and experimental feel, the album sound similar to something produced by The Polyphonic Spree or The Shins. Many people today would consider this indie. That might be true if there was such a genre called indie.

I first hear of this album on NPR. They had play a bit of the gem of the CD, 'Do You Realize?'. I listened to it, and i knew i wasn't the first time that I had heard it. It was so familiar. And do you know why? The song was used in many commercials, for land rover, and vh1.

'Do you realize' can be interpreted as a song about the end. The end of anything. Particular to the song, relationships, life and love. Much in line with Robert Frost's poem, 'Nothing gold can stay'. He, as Yoshimi's robot lover, will one day be found out and killed, but as a emotional computing machine, he sings to her, that do not worry about the end, realize that it is inevitable, live out this moment. It has been said that the lead singer, wrote this song while going through heroin withdrawals where he could only think of his deceased father.

I have played this album while carpool with friends. It drew curious attention as the most likely of love and tragedy albums, between not of a man and a woman but of a woman and a robot. Unlike the topic of millions of songs before, this was probably the first time they had heard of a subject as creative as this.

If you are open minded enough to listen to an album so absurd in comparison to the norm, you owe it to yourself to listen to this ingenious piece of work. Also, be sure to view the collection of album art for this cd. The paintings, whomever may have draw them (I don't have the cd with me, don't shoot me artist of unknown name), are pretty nice as well.