Best of the Decade #9: Flaming Lips

I don't remember exactly which year the band I was in opened for the Flaming Lips, but I do recall two things about the evening.

1. They were so loud that the police showed up during the sound check (the song they played was a cover of A Flock of Seagulls' "Space Age Love Song").
2. I stayed in the other room that night and worked the merch table instead of checking them out.

I think I was a little burned out on alt-rock by that time, and the Flaming Lips hadn't made their move toward the almost Wings-esque sounds of 1999's The Soft Bulletin, so perhaps I can be forgiven for my philistinism.

Even so, I doubt it would have adequately set me up for the one-two punch of Soft Bulletin and the album I'm including here, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Maybe it just came along at the right time; Mrs. Q and I had just closed up our vintage vinyl shop and I had just started a new job when I first heard this disc, which wears its melancholy so proudly.

The critic Nik Cohn has a line about Pet Sounds where he describes that album as "sad songs about sadness and sad songs about happiness." That seems apt here as well. The obvious standout track here is "Do You Realize??" in which lead singer/superfluous punctuation enthusiast Wayne Coyne offers up a bit of stoner wisdom and in the process creates my pick for the song of the decade (there, I said it). (I first heard this track a couple years before I heard the disc in its entirety, as I was going through a few other tumultuous upheavals, but that's a story for another time.)

So in the end, this might not be the most adventurous pick on this list, but in many ways it's the most personal. We got diminishing returns from the group with their next album, At War with the Mystics, but Yoshimi more than ensures the Lips' place in the pantheon.

09 Do You Realize--.mp3