Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (Live At The OKC Zoo Amphitheatre Aug. 30, 2024)

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There aren’t a lot of distractions in Oklahoma City—which helps explain how the area’s most prominent weirdo, The Flaming Lip, managed to release ten album between 1986’s <i>Hear It Is</i> and 2002’s <i>Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots</i>. But that statistic fails to fully measure the band’s proficiency. According to lead singer Wayne Coyne, the group was working on no fewer than three distinct projects while creating <i>Yoshimi</i>, including the country-leaning soundtrack to <i>Okie Noodling</i>—a documentary about men who catch giant catfish with their bare hands—and the synthesizer score to Coyne’s own self-directed full-length homage to 1950s sci-fi B movie, <i>Christmas on Mars</i>. Those disparate efforts all played a role in the creation of <i>Yoshimi</i>, which Coyne once described as a “candy-coated potato chip” of an album. On <i>Yoshimi</i>, the western twang and martian bleeps meld with the maximalist space-rock the band had perfected on its previous album, <i>The Soft Bulletin</i>. That record secured the group’s place in the pantheon of consequential album artist, freeing the Lips from the one-hit-wonder tag that had clung to the group since 1993’s “She Don’t Use Jelly.” .

via Apple Music

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