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.