At the start of the Flaming Lips concert on Wednesday, July 17, at Artpark, frontman Wayne Coyne announced that there were aliens in the front row. This statement was close, but off. To anyone in the audience, it appeared the real aliens were on stage.
In fact, Coyne was dressed in a tight blue jumpsuit embedded with lights that flashed throughout the set. He was also armed with an array of toys, such as confetti guns, and did not look quite like any other rock performer on planet Earth. In spite of the upper-nineties heat and fiercely bright sun, Coyne felt that the evening was a good night to “hear some weird music” and there was no doubt he followed through on this promise for weirdness.
Coyne sang atop what looked like a pile of metallic rocks (or, with the right stretch of imagination, some kind of fallen robot a la Iron Man), from which ran lighting cables attached to the upper back stage. Although the cables might have limited the band’s mobility, they did offer an unusual, tentacle-like array of lighting at the forefront of the stage. The huge video monitor in the back never failed to mesmerize, whether it looped feel-good images of pretty flowers or downright frightening visions of black and white static or what looked to be various animals’ teeth. It was the sort of stuff that gives psychedelic rock its drug-culture image, something that was somewhat evident Wednesday night. The smell of burning joints seemed to hang perennially over the audience, and more than a few cheered to Coyne’s repeated urges that everyone “get drunk.”
The band opened with the scratchy space-rock of “Look The Sun is Rising” and the slow, transcending rhythms of “The Terror,” both from the group’s latest album, this year’s “The Terror.” Coyne was inexplicably holding a toy plastic baby throughout the first tune, and the second ended with huge amounts of black confetti being fired onto the audience, looking almost as though a massive swarm of bats or locusts had overtaken Artpark.
Musically, the Lips offered up the kind of lush, transcending soundscapes we often equate with Radiohead. There were times when the gentle synths and Coyne’s spacey voice lulled the audience into calm, and at other times the music lashed out with rough static-sounds that could almost be described as industrial. The dirty bass of “The W.A.N.D.” and the grinding instrumentals in the Devo-covered “Gates of Steel” showed the band’s lively, hard-rock attitude, often lost in their strangeness. But probably the most memorable part of the night was the performance of “A Spoonful Weighs A Ton.” Coyne repeated the song’s final line “the sound they made was love” over and over and over again, as the word “LOVE” flashed in huge bright letters behind him. Then, for at least five minutes, he kept chanting “love.” And when his chants finally stopped, the video screen behind him kept flashing those four heart-warming letters, and the audience kept the chant going. These aliens have some heart.
Set List:
Look… The Sun is Rising
The Terror
The W.A.N.D.
Silver Trembling Hands
Try to Explain
Butterfly, How Long it Takes To Die
All We Have Is Now
Gates of Steel (Devo cover)
Turning Violent
A Spoonful Weights A Ton
Encore:
Do You Realize
Always there…In Our Hearts
All Photos by J. Ritz.
We would like to thank Maria Hays from Artpark for her assistance in helping BackstageAxxess review the show.
