It is one thing to be confused for an irreverent yet sophisticated genius; it is another thing entirely to be recognised as a Martian. Although he is only one of the members of the Flaming Lips, as the central songwriter Wayne Coyne is often identified as a man apart; far removed from our planet. All of these out-of-this-world descriptions are a little unfair as this portrays the man as an unhinged eccentric and his songs to be far-out and “just craaazzzy man!” Whereas the reified figure of the man and this particular group happens to be as one of the most metaphysically challenging songwriters since aggression and stamping your feet because you’re not allowed car keys became de rigeur through late seventies punk.
Yoshimi… is the most impressive release this year, as an album there is more considered thought here in the merriment of the moment than at an Oxford Don’s stag night. Produced by Dave Fridmann, backroom brain for Mercury Rev, in upper state New York, the music continues to be a confronting melee of nefarious guitar lines and reconstructed beats. On Yoshimi… each song continues to look at the confusion of reality, love, death, loss, the challenge of science, classification and anxiety sung of on the last album The Soft Bulletin, but all in the frame of a small Japanese girl fighting and falling in love with a gigantic robot threatening the world. An utterly ludicrous idea initially, all Peter Gabriel and Genesis at their most outlandish and frustrating. Once within its influence the album’s story-line concept is not that far removed from a fairy tale, which makes palatable the pessimistic thoughts upon life and its extinguishing.
On the single Do You Realize? where the chorus punctuates in perfect time, do you realize/one day/ that all your friends will die, in the context of Coyne’s mind this statement is not a down at heal, annoyed at the world moan, rather a recognition of the finite. What makes the song startling is the amount of space left around the words by the Lips. Where on The Soft Bulletin there was a lush orchestration, more Pet Sounds than the battering ram of a wall of sound, the texture of each song is finely balanced. Electronic beats throughout are administered by Peter Mokran, who has been used to finalise the album’s mix through his work hauling in the lavish and indulgent moves of P-Diddy, has maneuvered the back(break)beat through a realm of samples, acoustic references and guitar. All of this lovingly documented and overseen by Wayne.
If this man was so detached from the world and from the way people think, and it is easy to mock the concept behind Yoshimi… then why does the content of the joy found in love, the uncertainty of what happens to us after death and the confidence of knowing when we are alive make so much sense and in return such a joy to listen to?
Mainly because if Wayne was howling at the moon it makes the marketing of such an uncomfortably but poignant album bursting with content easier to sell. With In The Morning of the Magicians, whose orchestral swell reveals the equivalent of a startling delight at each rise in its register, Coyne’s philosophical point of view would catch attention more if the listener were led to believe he is really singing about wizards and their wild adventures! Whereas the subtlety of each passing sonic epistle from this man shows a creativity unbound in mixing the seemingly bizarre with insightful musings and it would continue to be childish to dismiss him further as a straightjacketed maniac just to except this fact.
It takes someone so close to how we perceive and are confused by the things and experiences around us that to articulate them, even though his voice may crack when trying to hit the notes, makes him one of the most expressive individuals alive.