The Flaming Lips give their bloody best at the Greek
Kevin Bronson on
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By Jeff Miller
A few years ago, the Flaming Lips found themselves in a tough place. The long-running, critically acclaimed Oklahoma band had spent the last decade developing a rabid, semi-mainstream following as the thinking-man’s party band, with a stageshow that couldn’t have been more life-affirming: It was all confetti, and dancing animals, and singer Wayne Coyne in an inflatable globe, and smiles, and wonderment.
But the schtick was getting old, to some, and repetitive, clearly, to the band. And when they released their latest album, “The Terror,” last year, their music had clearly changed directions as well: They’d revisited the paranoid, proggy, sometimes-plodding psych-rock that defined their early career, long before “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots” made them favorites of the Day-Glo crowd.
With the new direction came a new show, which the band delivered, Halloween-style, at the Greek Theatre on Tuesday night. Gone are the dancing animals and up-with-people charm, replaced by silhouettes, a slithering lightshow with Coyne atop what looks like a monstrous coil of snakes, and a massive, backlit screen showing drug-addled images both uneasy and bright. When the band delivered this show at the Pacific Amphitheater in the O.C. earlier this summer, it felt, well, wrong: you’re at the state fair, seeing one of the world’s great celebratory bands, not some dark overlord playing with your college-flashback acid trips. But at the Greek, something clicked. It was almost fright night, after all, and Coyne was clad as Carrie, complete with caked-on stage blood that he kept nearly slipping on, giving the show a real sense of dread.
“It’s the end of the world,” Coyne said, more than once, and even the older standbys felt more morose: “Race For The Prize” was slowed down and foreboding; the closing “Do You Realize” simplified and sparse. The newer songs spiraled in psych-noise waves, warming up the chilly night only slightly.
Though the band (which this week released a new EP, “Peace Sword”) was scheduled to collaborate with openers White Denim and Tame Impala, they started late and never got to that section of the show, which was a bummer. Also disappointing: The band never quite reached the emotional peak promised by the first five minutes, which found Coyne in crimson shadows as confetti and balloons poured over the crowd. That said, anyone who’d seen the Lips in the past would expect that to last an hour. There’s only so long you can stay happy before you crash: Watching the Flaming Lips hit that point is arresting, disarming and still mind-blowingly awesome.
Jeff Miller is the Los Angeles editor for Thrillist.com
Photo by Timothy Norris via LA Weekly; view his entire, and very colorful, slideshow from the night here.
Wow. I couldn’t disagree more. You should have seen the crowd around me yawning…bewildered and confused. How many two chord keyboard songs can you deal with at 60bpms? I would have left, had my car not been parked in with the others at the Greek’s lot. They got blown out of the water by White Denim and Tame Impala. Seemed like a confused, Marylyn Manson Lite show…without him actually changing costumes or sets…the only thing Wayne did consistently was shout “come on” (pandering to the crowd-Please Love Us!), while sticking to the down tempo two chord keyboard jams. Snore. Only worse show I saw was…scratch that, second worse show because they were actually trying (even though Dave couldn’t do it)-was the Van Halen reunion. And, he kept saying, “It’s the end of the world”…huh? Should be the end of this show. Come down to earth and write some songs boys.