Happiness Makes You Cry: A Review of the Flaming Lips at Artpark
The band’s 'Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots' anniversary tour melted faces and hearts in Lewiston
Attending a Flaming Lips show is like walking into the imaginary landscape John Lennon conjured in “Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds.” There’s that Lennon-esque tinge of surrealism everywhere you look and in all you’re hearing.
But there’s much more than lysergic strangeness in the Lips’ universe. When you enter the band’s world, what you find there is the gift of empathy, offered with a side of compassion, adorned with technicolor sonics, lush arrangements, surprising, syncopated rhythms, and haunting chord changes.
Singer and ringmaster Wayne Coyne is the medium for these gifts, and over the course of the dozens and dozens of time I’ve experienced the Lips live, he has never failed to deliver them.
The current tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of the band’s iconic Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots album offers fans the opportunity to bask in the multi-hued glory of all that makes this band so special - the otherworldly melodies, the playful props, the mind-melting light show, the dense sonic heft of the musical ensemble, and the open-hearted invitation to joy that is the Lips’ raison d’etre.
The first set of the Lips’ transcendent July 22 show at Artpark found the band embracing Yoshimi’s charms and sharing them in the album’s original running order, top to bottom.
Yoshimi is many things to the many people who hold the album dear, but one of those things is surely its crystallization of Coyne’s personal metaphysics . Yoshimi could well be the most effective distillation of his gifts as a lyricist, as a thinker, and as a shaman/healer. (That will only sound like I’m gilding the lily if you’re not a Flaming Lips fan.)
Whether he was outlining the titular heroine’s struggles against the strident march of totalitarianism, urging us all to embrace the moment (“All We Have Is Now”), or noting the travails of a machine gaining consciousness and coming to life (“One More Robot”), Coyne worked tirelessly to engage the imaginations of the assembled, and by all appearances, he succeeded in doing so.
There are a handful of songs that form the core of Yoshimi, which is in essence an album dedicated to wrestling light away from the darkness and rescuing joy from the jaws of a permeating sorrow. “It’s Summertime” is a heart-rending elegy that pits the natural beauty of the season against the inner turmoil of a grief-stricken psyche. “In the Morning of the Magicians” summons a dream state in which the narrator ponders the apparent meaninglessness of love in an often evil, transactional and cynical world. “Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell” laments the ego’s ability to assume a dominant position, in the process blinding us to the magnitude of the moment.
And then there’s “Do You Realize?,” in my view, one of the most impactful lyrics ever written. Coyne’s gift is the ability to be brutally honest about the nature of living and the inevitability of death, and then employ these hard truths as a springboard toward finding deep meaning in life. It’s existentialism, with a drop-dead gorgeous melody. (“Do you realize that everyone you know one day will die? So instead of saying all of your goodbyes/Let them know you realize that life goes fast/It’s hard to make the good things last/You realize the sun doesn’t go down/It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning ‘round…”)
During the Artpark show, I felt the emotional pendulum swung freely between an almost manic joyfulness and profoundly beautiful sadness. I found myself screaming with glee at one moment and crying like a baby the next. Looking around me, I noticed that I was far from alone.
(Video footage from Paul Marko)
While Coyne is the focal point of the live show, the rest of the band - Steven Drozd (keyboards/guitar/harmony vocals), Derek Brown (guitars/keyboards/harmony vocals) Tommy McKenzie (bass) and Matt Duckworth Kirksey (drums) - are also all Ninjas, masters of the ensemble interplay that erupts as the grandiloquent, magical, all-enveloping sound of the Flaming Lips. The Yoshimi material is not easily recreated in the live environment - it’s a masterpiece of sonic manipulation and texture, produced by another Ninja, the great Dave Fridmann - but the band constantly captured the lushness and sonic muscle the material demands.
Yoshimi’s battle completed, the band took a short break, and then returned with a second set of songs culled from the albums The Soft Bulletin, At War with the Mystics, American Head and Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, with standouts including a giddy “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” a contemplative “Suddenly Everything Has Changed,” a beautifully bombastic “Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung,” the progressive orchestrations underpinning “A Spoonful Weighs A Ton,” and a positively life-affirming “Race for the Prize.”
And then, off we went, back to our “real” lives. And yet, somehow, the colors seemed brighter and the sounds clearer today. I hope it lasts…
Nailed it!
The FOMO is real! 🤘🏽