The Flaming Lips @ Metropolis

As July has begun with a sauna of a heatwave in Montreal, the thought of attending a show at Metropolis is the slightest bit daunting, especially when the Humidex is approaching 40 in the celsius column.

When the headliner happens to be The Flaming Lips, you tend to not care about these kinds of things (that is, if you're in the know).  If you are not, fair reader, allow me to attempt to do this experience some justice with words and put you into my eyes and ears for a little while.  Walking into the venue, I was greeted with the cool wash of an air-conditioned lobby, and audibly muttered, "Thank you Lord".

The opener Fang Island had just started manically strumming their set as I walked in, and their relentless assault of happy, heavy prog-rock was blowing through the room like a Japanese cartoon character in a beer commercial on fast-forward.  I made the ill-advised move to the front of the stage right by a subwoofer that was the size of a Hummer SUV.  At points, I felt like I was being smashed in the chest with a Nerf sledge hammer during an earthquake.  The tunes were heavy, joyous, speedy and more instrumental than vocal.  The closer "Davy Crockett" was my favorite part of their set; a six-minute builder that starts quietly with keyboards and then stays in the pocket and cranks the three guitars up to obscene volume.  The bass player finished me off with what felt like a real sledge hammer to the eardrums, but I knew it was just part of the band's style.

Now that we were in a break, I got a chance to check out the Flaming Lips stage set-up from up close.  Everything was painted orange and customized to the hilt; and I mean EVERYTHING was orange.  All of the amps were caged in orange contraptions with orange mics duct taped to the structure; the giant orange bong-shaped confetti cannons at either side of front of the stage had lights attached to them.  Props, mic stands, pedal boards, keyboards, megaphones, the frame of the backdrop and anything else visible to the audience had been customized to the point that it was completely unique to the band; even the set up crew were dressed in orange construction gear.

And speaking of construction, frontman Wayne Coyne was walking around the stage helping with the set up, waving & smiling at us as he got his hands dirty.  The time started to drag on, and he took a microphone to let us know there were tech issues.  He also apologized for being late, explaining that their truck drivers were smoking crystal meth and they got stopped in New York state.  Whether that was true or not, it made people laugh and was followed by the assurance that the show would start soon, and the "space ball" would be making an appearance which drew cheers of anticipation.  For the uninitiated, Wayne has famously started almost every show by getting into an inflated 8-foot clear ball and walking onto the crowd.  Having seen it before from a few hundred yards away (at Osheaga 2006) and now being about 10 feet from the center of the stage, I got unashamedly giddy.

About 10 more minutes elapsed and then the beginnings of the proper show were apparent.  On the big screen a silhouetted naked woman was shown, and a pulse of light and sound was growing from…er…the middle of her body and a ramp was set up to meet the pulse.  As Wayne was below being inflated in his bubble, one by one the members of the band emerged through the light of the middle, warmly greeted us and bounced to their stations.  As the first bass distorted notes of "Worm Mountain" deliberately lumbered toward the crowd, the giant balloons and confetti cannons exploded 1000 birthday parties onto us at once.  Wayne (now in a fully-inflated sphere) raised his hands and walked to the edge of a few hundred outstretched hands.  A good couple of minutes passed as he dove & tumbled inside of his transparent chamber on top of the crowd.  He then ambled back to the stage to sing into his megaphone and shoot confetti from a small handheld cannon.  The strange and beautiful journey had begun.

The next song "Silver Trembling Hands" would serve as a leitmotif of the rest of the set's structure, containing elements of intense verse & shifted back chorus, and a healthy amount of call and response between band and crowd.  Overall the band would pull us all along at a quicker pace and then (perhaps with the heat of the night as a guide) pull it back providing a breather and an opportunity to chat for a moment.  Wayne introduced the rest of the songs in the set in some way or another, most of the time revealing his very motivations for doing what he does for a living.  For example, while leading into "She Don't Use Jelly" he recalled the band playing it on Beverly Hills 90210 back in the 90s (the "Dylan, give me your keys" era) leading to a spike in the band's popularity.  Expressing sincere gratitude for something that can just as easily be mocked, he turned the crowd into a few thousand back up singers.

Keeping the crowd's energy up, the band continued with "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Song", and with that came more big balloons; this time they were filled with confetti and Wayne had a small spike at the end of his guitar headstock…you can guess where this went.  At the risk of sounding gushy, it must be said that to respond at a Flaming Lips show is to be there.  Wayne's microphone was mounted with a small camera, showing his sweating face on the big screen backdrop and making it compelling to stay on the ride.

At about the mid point of the set, there was an acoustic break of sorts, with a stripped down version of "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1" and "I Can Be a Frog".  In the former, the crowd sang along at a competitive volume compared to the band's own and in the latter, we joined drummer Kliph Scurlock in making the improvised sound effects called out during the song.  If you check out the album Embryonic, the response duties are done on the track by Yeah Yeah Yeah's own Karen O and seemingly via telephone and it's definitely something to behold.

Back to the rockin', we cymbal crash ourselves back into it with "See the Leaves" and on the backdrop wee see (presumably) the silhouette of the same naked woman crashing a cymbal at the same time as our frontman.  The bass line trudges along in a cultish fashion and leads us into one of the highlights for me, which was the song "Powerless".

To introduce the song, he exclaimed that the chorus line, "No one's ever really powerless" is something he thinks might really be true only when he's playing the guitar.  It was a beautiful sentiment, showing Wayne the person peeking through Wayne the performer telling the audience that music is what saves him from crumbling against an ugly world.  For the song, he dons the electric guitar and frantically strums a delay-riddled one note solo; Steven Drozd plays keys and drum pads on his Frankenstein set up, bassist Michael Ivins keeps it all creeping forward in a little pocket of psych goodness.

And then out came a pair of giant hands.

I neglected to mention that part of the set were two ominously hanging disco balls; big ones that were about 6 or 7 feet in diameter.  The big hands were mounted on sticks to hold them up, each hand being about the size of a human torso.  The lights went out and from those hands sprang dozens of strands of laser light, onto those two mirrored balls and into the crowd.  You know, just because…

Closing out the proper set, were two tracks from 2006's decidedly commercial offering At War With the Mystics, the first being "Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung" sung by Steven Drozd.  Mr. Coyne brought out a gong and every time it was hit, a splash of LED rainbow lights decorated the structure holding it up.  Between the lasers and rainbows, I asked myself what was missing.  The set closer, "The W.A.N.D." answered with probably the most intense strobe lights I've ever experienced, including one around Wayne's neck.  All of them kept going through the highwater mark of the song's intensity and only stopped when the song took a breath.  I closed my eyes at one point and I swear that although sober, I saw some things on the insides of my eyelids that could have been featured on a '60s acid freakout movie.

There was only one encore song and from its absence in this review thus far, it's obvious that the show would end with the band's most successful and known song possibly now and forever, "Do You Realize?".  It brought everything back to where we all started, with exploding confetti cannons, more giant balloons and one more push for all of us to give that much more love to a band that gave us so much in return in 90 minutes.

At the risky of being schmaltzy, love really is the right word to describe what was going on at Metropolis on Wednesday July 7th, 2010.  Many bands give a lot of effort to their live show, but The Flaming Lips give love to their audience and insist that they cheer, yell, clap, sing, dance, hit balloons, make animal noises and generally help to hold them up through the process.  At one point (being close enough to the stage) I could swear to you that as Wayne was calling for applause, I could see him mouth the words "C'mon, I wanna play more".

When the house lights went up and we were all walking away from the stage, I heard a few cheers, and turning back we saw Wayne one last time waving at us one last time showing his gratitude.  So many people in rock are too cool to be human beings right after the point that they were rock stars for a couple of hours; The Flaming Lips are the ear-to-ear smiling exception to that rule.  I bought a T-shirt on the way out that says, "I experienced The Flaming Lips in concert and it made be a better human being" and although a cynic would call it pretentious, I defy anyone to see them live and not feel that very same way.