—Ron Wynn

Anyone born after 1965 should understand what I mean when I say that Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne—who on the band’s new album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (Warner Bros.) sings about black-belted Japanese women who fight to save us all from being eaten by giant machines—could well be the voice of his generation. Hip kiddie cartoons, post-George Lucas blockbusters and video games have conditioned many of us to comprehend complex ideas and emotions via bold metaphors; with infinite information streams, a prophet needs to dazzle.

On 1999’s stunning The Soft Bulletin, Coyne and the Lips made that connection, bringing a 15-year career’s worth of space-case musings down to earth while simultaneously sending their giddy noise-pop into orbit. The album revolved around the theme of mortality in the same way that Alan Parsons Project records used to be about Orwell or Poe (or something). The Flaming Lips, however, deployed brighter orchestration and more distinct philosophizing, turning hard reality into surprisingly meaningful comic book fantasy.

Fans of The Soft Bulletin might have difficulty getting past the initial disappointment that Yoshimi isn’t a great musical leap forward. It’s more like the Lips, having stumbled onto a workable sound—one that improbably balances The Beach Boys, Pink Floyd and Neil Young with an X-factor of technophilic hip-hop—decided to fix that position, so that they could make secure leaps into the mystic-poetic. The Soft Bulletin may have been the first feel-good record about the inevitability of death, and now Yoshimi (a more focused effort in many ways) deals with the ramifications of Coyne’s new understanding.

Specifically, the new album is about conflict. Opening with “Fight Test,” in which Coyne acknowledges the difficulty of standing up for one’s beliefs in a culture that prizes relativism, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots repeatedly holds conflicting ideas up for examination, wondering, as on “In the Morning of the Magicians”: “What is love and what is hate? / And why does it matter?” The crush-our-enemies boosterism of the aforementioned title track gets balanced by the preceding “One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21,” which enters the mind of a killer robot and finds a burgeoning humanity. Elsewhere, Coyne receives a visit from his future self, who tells him “we’re not going to make it...all we have is now.” On the declamatory (and insanely catchy) “Do You Realize??” he notes that “The sun doesn’t go down / It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning 'round.”

If all of the above seems goofy, it’s worth noting that Coyne seems to acknowledge the goofiness and to embrace it, without losing a drop of sincerity. And even if all The Flaming Lips are really saying is that the world is a hostile but beautiful place whose mysteries will not yield to hard-line ideologies, the message nevertheless blooms, providing a fanciful, colorful counterpoint to fervidly patriotic, chart-topping country songs and the dully formalist (albeit genuinely affecting) mourning-via-arena-rock-rowdiness of Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising. The Lips’ version of life has an appealing logic to accompany the dreamy melodies. It’s cracked, but it’s curative.

—Noel Murray

In the 1960s, as bedrock blues performers played to rapt audiences of white folkies, African American listeners were moving on to soul or funk two generations removed from its Southern roots. Now the classic gospel-derived R&B sound turns up mostly on oldies radio, sandwiched between Beach Boys cuts, while black pop music is dominated by rap and “nu soul.” Is old-school soul in danger of becoming more collectible exotica for white hipsters? Perhaps, but the power of the music might be enough to save it from irrelevant nostalgia, as two straight-up modern-day R&B records prove.

If anybody would be likely to hoke up the joint, it’s Fat Possum, the Mississippi imprint that’s carved a niche turning regional bluesmen into frat-party blaxploitation heroes. But the label performs something close to a public service with the aptly titled Don’t Give Up on Me, the new album by legendary soul singer Solomon Burke. Recording live with producer Joe Henry and a crew of sympathetic players (including his church organist, Rudy Copeland), Burke testifies on ready-mades commissioned from Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Van Morrison and Nick Lowe. If this A list sometimes submits A-minus to B material, Burke still invests each song with a mortal urgency that removes any trace of revivalism. When he gets a song as great as Dan Penn’s pleading title track, he doesn’t turn the clock back to his glory days with Atlantic Records; he stops it here and now.

By contrast, the too-cute packaging for Dap-Dippin With...Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings (Daptone) tries to make it appear that time stopped in about 1968: The cover resembles a hi-fi artifact down to the “stereo compatible” logo and the band members’ astrological signs (yuk yuk). Once you get past the retro hootiness, Georgia R&B belter Jones blows the art-directed dust off the grooves, whipping a hot young band through the kind of sweaty regional funk that sends turntablists trawling through garage sales. The best cut sends Janet Jackson’s “What Have You Done for Me Lately” through the wayback machine to emerge with a Sly and the Family Stone barnburner.

Collectively, Jones and Burke bring more than a century of life experience to these records: She’s a 45-year-old former prison guard, while the sexagenarian Burke is an ordained minister and funeral-home owner. Their longevity helps to explain the hard-won joy and passion in these records—and why classic soul music will outlive the trends and tastes of the moment.

—Jim Ridley

Full Circle, the eagerly anticipated Arista debut from Boyz II Men, is an overproduced, mediocre disappointment. After 14 years, Wanya and Nathan Morris, Michael McCary and Shawn Stockman are such polished vocalists that they never actually sound uninspired, but their strength remains thematic interpretation, not songwriting, arranging or producing. While songs like “Whatcha Need” and “Right on Time” feature slashing vocal exchanges, sincere leads and rumbling spoken-word narratives, most of Full Circle is overloaded with limp, dreary romantic ballads and forgettable club tracks.

Strangely, R&B heavyweights are responsible for the set’s weakest moments: Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ “Oh Well” and Babyface’s “The Color of Love” both combine feeble lyrics with feeble arrangements. Evidently, company honchos thought they might subtly enhance Boyz II Men’s appeal by spiking their musical backgrounds with hip-hop beats. Unfortunately, despite executive producer and label head Antonio Reid’s prerelease hype, Full Circle won’t be the disc that restores Arista’s urban clout.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the sibling rivalry between Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis—as well as the duo’s indulgence in the rock 'n’ roll lifestyle—did more than keep the Manchester lads on the covers of the British tabloids. With recording sessions for the band’s new release Heathen Chemistry (Epic) described in its press materials as “sober and relaxed, unmarked by tantrums or walkouts,” the final product proves that negative passion may be better than no passion at all. Guitarist and principal songwriter Noel usually crafts well-written (if highly derivative) singles, but his contributions here are disappointing, save for the anthemic chorus of “Little by Little” and the Beatles-esque piano intro and “Wonderwall” aesthetic of “Stop Crying Your Heart Out.” Vocalist Liam, guitarist Gem Archer and bassist Andy Bell split five of the 11 cuts between themselves; oddly enough, it’s relative newcomer Archer’s “Hung in a Bad Place” that comes closest, albeit almost to a plagiaristic fault, to recapturing the glory days of Definitely Maybe. Otherwise, the group’s fifth studio album is mired in dull, languid rock, uninspired arrangements and underwhelming vocals. It’s a far cry from the cocky, bugger-off approach Oasis rode to fame in the mid-’90s.

—Doug Brumley

This may sound cruel, but Aimee Mann’s songwriting should’ve benefited more from the tension created by her constant battles with the recording industry. Along with Wilco, she’s become a mascot for the abuse of artists by major labels; while Wilco signed to another major after being dropped by Reprise, Mann started her own Superego label and got just about as much publicity. Alas, the story behind her new album, Lost in Space (the first one recorded completely under her own auspices), turns out to be more interesting than the music—and in the long run, the relative comfort of running her own label may not be so beneficial to Mann’s work.

On the surface, Mann often sounds like other generic female singer-songwriters, but her music usually contains a vital urgency. That slow-burning intensity present in classic Mann recordings like “Build That Wall” and “Wise Up” is now missing. A guitar-dominated surface often hides relatively elaborate instrumentation and arrangements, influenced by the same sort of '60s orchestral rock Mann pursued more overtly with producer Jon Brion on the Magnolia soundtrack. It’s not that she’s repeating herself, exactly: “High on Sunday 51” and “This Is How It Goes” expand her musical palette by including bluesy slide guitar, while other tracks go for spacey atmospherics. Nevertheless, Lost in Space is the kind of album that sounds fine while one listens to it but leaves nothing to digest. It’s the musical equivalent of having salad for dinner.

—Steve Erickson

During the mid-’90s, singer-songwriter John Bunzow made a Pete Anderson-produced album for Liberty Records titled Stories of the Years. The disc never was released; Liberty imploded, eventually becoming the Capitol Nashville slaughterhouse. Bunzow revisits some of the songs from Stories on his latest, self-produced CD, Darkness and Light (Sideburn), and perhaps because the Portland, Ore., native has had his share of personal and professional knocks during the past few years, he now sings with a passion and resolve only hinted at on the Liberty recordings. The heartbroken trucker song “Desolation Road,” long a pile-driving staple of Bunzow’s repertoire, sounds like it was written the day it was cut.

Darkness and Light rocks harder than Bunzow’s previous work, though its Music Row/Dire Straits-circa-1992 production values sometimes hamstring the record. Whereas the Anderson sides were stripped-down and crystalline, the new CD, despite being recorded in the basement studio of co-producer Brian David Willis, possesses an occasional in-your-face instrumental swirl that detracts from Bunzow’s vocal immediacy. Still, the more recent, damn-lucky-to-still-be-around material on Darkness and Light demonstrates that, as a writer, Bunzow’s digging deeper than ever. “The weight on my shoulders / Got so heavy they just gave in,” he sings on “Pieces on the Ground”—and you believe him.

—Paul Griffith

In brief

A consensus of trendspotters is that the future of rock looks more like the energized neo-garage of The White Stripes and The Mooney Suzuki—or the arty thought-punk of The Strokes and The Walkmen—than the featureless metal-lite of Nickelback, Silvercrush or any of those other bands who sound like they picked their name by pointing randomly at words in a Radio Shack catalog. The rush to find rock that actually rocks has led to some overvaluation and misunderstanding, though. The Vines have garnered comparisons to Nirvana, Supergrass and The Strokes since their early singles began drawing a buzz in the British Isles last year, and the confusion over how best to describe the Australian modern-rock power trio underscores the absence of anything extraordinary about them. The Vines’ debut LP, Highly Evolved (Capitol), comes across with a reasonable amount of gut-shot strut, soupy harmonics and grunge-affected sing-along pop. The tracks, however, tend to start promisingly and then become undone by shoddy construction—hitting a wall when a weak chorus lets down a strong opening guitar signature, or when the signature itself proves less appealing after a half-dozen iterations. The bash-first, ask-questions-later style (dampened by a Big Rock sound straight from a Hollywood recording studio) shows only a little promise, and no more than could be claimed for 20 other recent overseas rock saviors.... Better to stay in New York, where the disciples of edge possess both ambition and affectlessness while raising a glorious racket. Sonic Youth keep holding the line for the exploitation of pop culture white noise on their new album, Murray Street (DGC), bringing aboard Jim O’Rourke, the producer of 2000’s NYC Ghosts & Flowers, as a fifth member and burrowing into a set of warmer, quieter, more reflective songs. The first half of the record is lovely, and establishes a context for the more raucous second half, where the band prove again their willingness to tease and provoke for the sake of cheap, listenable art.... In advance of a full-length due next month, fellow New Yorkers Interpol have delivered an eponymous three-song teaser on Matador, introducing listeners to their pulsing, slashing twin-guitar patterns, hooky bass, danceable beats and minor-key moans. The quartet have been compared to early Cure and Joy Division, but their extended echo-scapes are fuller, and evoke images of streetlamps reflecting off the windows of metropolitan trains.... Finally, another band of Big Apple comers currently prepping their LP have rereleased their jaw-dropping debut EP on Touch & Go. Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ self-titled disc dwells in the distorted, bluesy, how-loud-can-just-a-guitar-and-drums-be? aesthetic familiar from countless indie rockers, but the trio have an elevating element in lead singer Karen O, whose bratty taunts and worldly boho posturing melt together Chrissie Hynde, Lydia Lunch and The Waitresses’ Patty Donahue (or is it Romeo Void’s Debora Iyall?). The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ EP is assaultive but self-aware, even vulnerable at times, and next to The Walkmen’s sublime Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone, it’s the New York art-punk record of the hour.

—Noel Murray