The Flaming Lips

The Flaming Lips

About the time of choreographed 4-CD oddity Zaireeka, Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne probably went a bit mad. How else to unpack his revelation that far more people would respond to rock music populated by wizards, robots, and nuclear scientists than to the psychedelic post-punk he and his fellow Oklahomans had been propagating since the mid-1980s? The Yoshimi story, neatly summarized in the 2002 album's title, dissipates after the first four songs, but in that quartet, Capt. Coyne swipes at cynicism and irony via his vitamin-popping heroine. As existential allegory, it's not Sartre, but then Sartre didn't write pop songs. And Coyne, with a massive musical assist from Steven Drozd, can take a trivially true (and not particularly cheery) lyric – like "Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?" – drop it into a lush Lips creation, and turn it into something strangely joyous.