The Flaming Lips

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it is fucking endless! the sounds are pleasant but not engaging enough to sustain eight hours of slowness. it's the worst Lips album since...Hear It Is?

This is their first dud since 1990 though so whatevs, it's fine. I just hope the next one is decent.
 
Can't believe you fuckers didn't tell me that Miles is featured on the closing track. Time to listen to this album.
 
Evidently the Lips themselves don't give a shit about it - they've only played three songs off it (How, The Castle, There Should Be Unicorns). They're playing twice as many Soft Bulletin songs and three tracks off At War With the Mystics and Yoshimi.
 
I'm seeing them for the first time since the Mystics tour in a couple weeks and I'm excited as fuck, especially seeing the current sets. Replace the Oczy Mlody stuff with some 90s material and it would be perfect.
 
Let me know how it goes. Interested to hear if they've still got it. I declined to see them when they were last here cos I wasn't keen on paying $100 for a short set of songs I'd mostly seen before.
 
I still haven't heard their last album.

Really fell out of interest some time around The Terror and can barely remember anything on there.

Of course, I wasn't as head over heels with Embryonic as a lot of other people here.
 
Then try the new one, because I'm on the same boat as you.

I'm glad they're not playing a lot of it live. Wouldn't translate to that setting well. Those three are mainly all I wanted anyways.

Seeing for the first time is about all I can think about right now. Two weeks to go!
 
Saw them tonight for the first time in 11 years. The show was almost identical to what they've been doing every year in the meanwhile, sans that weird period after The Terror. It felt like the Mystics tour on steroids. The great part was 6(!) songs from The Soft Bulletin and a really snazzy version of Are You a Hypnotist. The fairly minuscule three new songs they played were by far and away the least interesting part of the show, but they're tolerable enough with the visuals and everything. As is status quo, they continue to pretend they never released an album before 1999.

Also, does every show in LA end early? This keeps happening to me. Silver Trembling Hands was on the printed program and they skipped it for no particular reason. That's one of my favorite Flaming Lips songs. I've had Peef-level concert luck ever since I moved here. Chicago shows are better, straight up.

This review reads a lot more negatively than it ought to. I really had a wonderful time, I'm just frustrated that they're slowly reverting back to the band they were in 2006, a worse band, a dinosaur band, after making so many great artistic strides with Embryonic and The Terror. It's like the last 8 years never happened. This is how I felt when ATYCLB tracks started to muscle all of the NLOTH out of the 360 tour because they lost all confidence in their current direction. That leg sucked.

I'm just trying to focus on the performance of Feeling Yourself Disintegrate, which was legitimately one of the greatest things I've ever seen on stage. Melancholy yet cathartic, with an insanely loud crescendo that isn't there on the album. The visuals throughout were really astounding too, better in many ways than what they used to have, or at least higher budget. Absolutely go see them if you can, but it's definitely not a setlist for people who loved the Flaming Lips when they were a rock band; it's dedicated 100% to the whimsical neo-psych stuff.
 
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That's weird they're not playing a lot of new songs. I saw them in 2013 during the tour behind The Terror and they played quite a bit of new songs at the time.
 
Can't believe you fuckers didn't tell me that Miles is featured on the closing track.

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There's only one Miles, son.

I feel like this is a conscious recoupling.

How many times have I told you to stay away from the power couplings?

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Would be keen to hear others' thoughts here. But I recall discussions from a few years ago, where we all sort of went from considering the band and their live show sacrosanct, to full of holes. I recall resisting that, being a lone voice saying they were still wonderful and all that. This would have been early-mid this decade. Embryonic is, in my opinion anyway, a masterpiece, and it came out in 09. And then for the next few years people started turning on them, as they started releasing 24-hour songs that could only be heard if you ate four kilos of gummy bears, or $1,000 vinyls encased with blood of collaborators, and Wayne started getting a bit too weird, and a little less wholesome. I still really, really liked Heady Fwends, which they dropped in 2012, but also started to get a bit uncomfortable when stories started coming out of Wayne being a dick, like what happened with Erykah Badu. I remember thinking well, at least we've still got their live show, and they did do a lot of exciting stuff around that time, but by that point a lot of you had started to become jaded by their live show as well.

Anyway, all of this is to say, that I think I've finally become a Flaming Lips old man yells at clouds type character. I saw them a couple of nights ago on their 20th anniversary tour of Soft Bulletin, and boy oh boy, do I have opinions. I really loved about half of the show, but was pretty frustrated with the other half.

Race for the Prize is one of my favourite songs of all time, its heady mixture of hope and loss and danger and bravery is amazing. It opens the show obviously, and does so in style, with tons of balloons and confetti being sprayed throughout the room, as well as a giant inflatable "FUCK YEAH MELBOURNE" sign. It was spectacular, but fast-forward about 15-20 minutes and all the balloons had popped, and there was this strange feeling of, well, what now? Something cool Bloc Party did with their anniversary tour of Silent Alarm was to play the album backwards. This meant that the main set closed raucously -- Banquet, Positive Tension, Helicopter and Like Eating Glass -- and by the midpoint of the main set I was wishing the Lips had done the same.

I don't know how long Wayne has been doing this "cmon cmon cmon" thing, in between, and even during songs, but it grew tired real fast. Before, during and after every song, he was urging us to keep screaming and hollering and cheering, saying that that is what sustains a Flaming Lips show and makes it so great... well yeah, it would have been, if you hadn't been forcing us to do it. Most people paid $140 to be there, why don't you bring the heat, and then we'll get on board? It left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. That joyousness shouldn't feel forced, it should come naturally, that's what makes magic gigs like that so magic, instead, it felt like they were trying to coerce it. This came to a head with Waiting for Superman. It was just him and Drozd on stage for this, and he gave like a two-minute spiel before they started it about how it's a sad song that doesn't fit the party vibe, and you need to help us get through it by constantly cheering and supporting us, and I was like, dude, it's one of my favourite songs ever because of its melancholic beauty, and you're essentially up here saying "we have to play this but we don't want to so cheer and it'll be over soon enough". The Flaming Lips' best quality in my view is this hope they offer amidst the melancholy, and instead of letting the catharsis come through their music, they kept trying to force it, like they were doing some pisstake pastiche of Coldplay.

The sound was bad. The piano and guitar were way too high in the mix, it was at the absolute top of my ears' capacity. You could barely hear Wayne's vocals for more than half of the songs. That works for some bands, and shoegaze-y acts, where the voice serves as another instrument, but Wayne's unqiue, lilting vocals are such a huge part of what makes Soft Bulletin so powerful, so to have them drowned out for most of the night was a huge bummer.

Interestingly, by far the highlight of the night came towards the end of the main set (they drag the album out by about 40 minutes by the way), with Feeling Yourself Disintegrate and Sleeping on the Roof. This was a 10-minute block where Wayne's incessant "cmon cheer!" couldn't fit, and it was really the only transcendent moment of the night, for me. Disintegrate is fantastic, and then Drozd finally gets a chance to shine towards the end, playing a huge solo as Wayne loses himself in the music. It was brilliant, and then Sleeping on the Roof was mesmerising, again, instrumental, and Wanye just swinging around an amber light, it was quite moving.

And then came an elongated encore, Yoshimi took about 10 minutes as he did a spiel mid-song about positivity, Hypnotist fell flat cos we couldn't hear his vocals, the Daniel Johnston cover was lovely, but again, not sure it needed the three-minute pre-spiel to be powerful, and then by the time Do You Realise?? rolled around, the cathartic release it should have been fell a bit flat, because there'd been 16 forced cathartic releases prior to that. It actually made me yearn for The Terror... I never really liked that album, but I look back now and it represents a pretty powerful outlier given what they've become.

The crowd lapped up the show, so I would have been in the minority, and obviously the band are in a place where they're just doing what they want, and nothing I say is gonna change that, so all power to them. And their sheer positivity in a troubled world is, to paraphrase Bono, something of a form of activism.

I just think they could be so much more.
 
I really hope next weekend's setlist isn't a carbon copy.

Wish you could have been here for the festival, Cobs. Seeing some other major bands would have lessened the disappointment.

I'm considerably more pumped for Ween (who have a history of slaying live) and Wu-Tang.
 
Dare say the only thing that’ll change will be the penultimate song. Yoshimi, Realise and the Johnston cover seem set in stone. Interested to hear your thoughts.
 
I saw them a few years ago in a split bill with Tame Impala and was thoroughly disappointed. Never felt like seeing them again, also because I've grown more detached from their music lately.

That said, I'm looking forward to the special 20th anniversary edition of The Soft Bulletin which my record club is shipping this month. Yoshimi is my favorite Flaming Lips album, but I still love both of them.
 
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Yup. They are awesome. That recent edition of the De La Soul record is one of the favorite things I own. Plus, they put out a lot of good Brazilian music (hope you got Africa Brasil a couple of months ago).
 
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Yeah, he's great - check out Samba Esquema Novo for his earlier and completely different style, a jazz- and bossa nova-influenced take on samba. The opening track is my favorite.

Now I'll stop monopolizing the Flaming Lips thread on tangential discussions.
 
I’m quite happy to talk about him! Also, I had a stab at a Flaming Lips setlist for a proper show.. would love people’s thoughts!!!

1. Kim's Watermelon Gun
2. Talkin' 'Bout the Smiling Deathporn Immortality Blues
3. The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song
4. Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World
5. When You Smile
6. The Spark That Bled
7. Convinced of the Hex
8. Aquarius Sabotage
9. See the Leaves
10. How??
11. Sleeping on the Roof
12. Fight Test / Father and Son snippet
13. Silver Trembling Hands
14. The Ego's Last Stand
15. Slow Nerve Action
16. Watching the Planets

17. The Abandoned Hospital Ship
18. Pilot Can at the Queer of God
19. She Don't Use Jelly

20. Do You Realise??
21. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots pt 1
22. Waitin' for a Superman
23. Race for the Prize

Embryonic - 6
Clouds Taste Metallic - 4
The Soft Bulletin - 4
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots - 3
Transmissions from the Satellite Heart - 3
Hit to Death in the Future Head - 1
At War with the Mystics - 1
Oczy Mlody - 1
 
I know At War with the Mystics has a lot of detractors, but I would have more stuff from that album. I've always wanted to hear Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung live, and I have a weak spot for Mr. Ambulance Driver too.

On Jorge Ben - I could discuss him all day, but I'd also love for people to discover Tim Maia as well. They were contemporaries and collaborators, but Tim Maia delved more into funk and psychedelia. His self titled albums from the early 1970s are all really good, and there's a more recent compilation "Nobody Can Live Forever: The Existential Soul of Tim Maia" which is really great. He died way too soon, at 56.
 
I’m quite happy to talk about him! Also, I had a stab at a Flaming Lips setlist for a proper show.. would love people’s thoughts!!!

1. Kim's Watermelon Gun
2. Talkin' 'Bout the Smiling Deathporn Immortality Blues
3. The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song
4. Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World
5. When You Smile
6. The Spark That Bled
7. Convinced of the Hex
8. Aquarius Sabotage
9. See the Leaves
10. How??
11. Sleeping on the Roof
12. Fight Test / Father and Son snippet
13. Silver Trembling Hands
14. The Ego's Last Stand
15. Slow Nerve Action
16. Watching the Planets

17. The Abandoned Hospital Ship
18. Pilot Can at the Queer of God
19. She Don't Use Jelly

20. Do You Realise??
21. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots pt 1
22. Waitin' for a Superman
23. Race for the Prize

Embryonic - 6
Clouds Taste Metallic - 4
The Soft Bulletin - 4
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots - 3
Transmissions from the Satellite Heart - 3
Hit to Death in the Future Head - 1
At War with the Mystics - 1
Oczy Mlody - 1


This would be six hours long with all of Wayne's talking between songs.



I wonder if he yaps so much as a way to keep the set lists short. They were great the two times I saw them but the sets were short and it's disappointing how they ignore so much of their career. I'd kill to hear stuff from Priest Driven Ambulance.
 
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