The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that we take a little time each issue to bang on about The Next Big Thing in music. Well forget everything we said before. If you want to know what the future of rock music is, do this: Take all the wasted potential of Beck, Air, Radiohead, and Moby and add it up. It might—might—register a slight blip on the Flaming Lips-O-Meter, and we guarantee it won’t be as hummable. 1999’s The Soft Bulletin was universally celebrated as the brilliant piece of work it so obviously is. And if it ended too soon for you (the way it did for us), well you only had to wait three years for the sequel. Don’t be frightened by the anime-inspired title and cover art. This new one is a collage of soulful synthesizer and disarmingly sweet lyrics, dubbed seamlessly with real acoustic guitars, standup snare, and some kind of gut-rumbling washtub. Yes, you’ll need to think expansively about what constitutes “music,” but if you’re really hungry for a disk that will support years of lights-out listening (the way great music used to be built), keep your ears on the odd fellows from Oklahoma. It’s sweet, it’s post-ironic, it’s categorically uncommercial. Gosh we like this one more than we can say.