Donuts, by a mile. Just great music and extremely (not at all sentimentally) poignant. Yoshimi is sweet but not even the best Flaming Lips album of the 2000s
I'll be coming back with some good old-fashioned promotion for Donuts later on tonight. For now, suffice it to say that I think it's sampling & beatmaking heaven, and I have voted for it.
I would actually put Yoshimi in the lower tier of Lips album, even though I still think its pretty good. Embryonic is my favorite 00/10's Flaming Lips album.
It's weird that this was a surprisingly easy decision for me. Went with Donuts. I have a real sentimental attachment to Yoshimi (it was the first album I owned by my favourite band, an album that has had as big of an influence on my listening life as The Blueprint or Blood On The Tracks), but if I could only choose one of these albums to listen to from now until my death it would be Donuts. Yoshimi just feels a little poppy, too often safe and predictable. Whilst I don't necessarily see those as bad things when listening to music, I just sort of expect more from The Flaming Lips. My favourite moments tend to be the instrumental songs, and I return to 'Yoshimi pt. 2' and 'Approaching Pavonis Mons' significantly more than any of the album's other tracks. I like to think that maybe I'm tired of the album because of how much I've listened to it, as though maybe the reason it doesn't excite me anymore is because of my own insistence on overexposure in my youth, but the same doesn't hold true of other albums I've heard hundreds of times. I still look forward to putting on The Blueprint, or Clouds Taste Metallic, or If You're Feeling Sinister. I feel like listening to Yoshimi is a chore these days, and I find myself reaching for the skip button all too often whenever I hear it, which is admittedly pretty infrequently. Donuts, on the other hand, is just wonderful. Dilla was capable of really breathing life into his beats, infusing them with a true sense of soul. Whilst my favourite work of his tends to be beneath vocalists or rappers (his contributions to The Pharcyde's Labcabincalifornia or Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun are the Dilla works I love the best), he is one of very few hip-hop producers who can make an entirely instrumental album work, and there probably isn't a better addition to the genre than Donuts. I love how this album is all easy-to-consume morsels of gorgeousness, keeping you entertained and on your toes thanks to the short track lengths and constant little changes of direction, somehow managing to maintain a real cohesion throughout. Despite everything I've said, I still love Yoshimi, and in many matches it would be my pick (though I will echo the sentiments of those who said it's not even the band's best of the 2000s, considering Embryonic exists), but I prefer Donuts. Donuts is an album I constantly find myself recommending to friends in an attempt to get them into hip-hop, or to help broaden their tastes, because it really is that good. Hip-hop would be a lesser genre without Dilla, and Donuts is probably his definitive release. Whilst it pains me to vote against an album that means as much to me as Yoshimi does, I've got to go with Donuts here.
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Norman Bates
Magikarp
MrFrogger
