Meet Yoshimi. She's a black belt in karate. She keeps in shape and takes her vitamins, because, well, it gets tough fighting giant androids bent on world domination.
The relativity of time, the finality of death and the drama of this Japanese lass going toe-to-toe with man-eating cyborgs constitute the themes of The Flaming Lips' latest release, "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots." Part pop-epic, part sci-fi pulp, the Lips use choir loops, teeth-rattling beats and wavering synth wizardry in their followup to 1999's much-lauded effort, "The Soft Bulletin."
Fans of their dreamier work will be pleased, as the lo-fi guitar crunch has been almost fully replaced with multi-layered production and saccharine dementia. It's the same peyote-flavored cotton candy as "Bulletin," but with the fingers of the Lips' brainchild, Wayne Coyne, stroking soundboards more often than strings. Crisp acoustic guitar riffs are sprinkled sparingly over the digital effluvium, making Coyne's whiny falsetto sound like a sedated Neil Young being probed by aliens in an X-Files outtake.