Life is supposed to get easier as you get older, but after 30 years The Flaming Lips are in what might be the darkest headspace of their lives.
Their new album, “The Terror,” has been inspired by singer Wayne Coyne’s recent separation from his long-term wife, as well as guitarist Steve Drozd’s brief drug relapse.
But last night at Terminal 5 (where they will play again tonight), the Oklahomans used those woes to forge their own version of life-affirming joy.
“We don’t want you motherf–kers to get sad,” explained Coyne early on, and you could tell he meant it by the band’s stage set alone.
Dressed in a blue space suit, standing on a giant metallic pod and lit up by dazzling colors shooting through fiber-optics, Coyne and his band looked like they had beamed in from another planet. One where instead of a sun they have strobe lighting, and instead of running water they have liquid ecstasy.
The psychedelic rock that The Flaming Lips have spent so many years is currently at its most dense and immersive. “Look . . . the Sun is Rising,” and “Butterfly, How Long It Takes to Die” aren’t the kind of happy, hooky songs they used to write during their brush with mainstream fame. They’re freaky, frantic and show a fearlessness that musicians in their 40s and 50s rarely have.
The payoff for this bravery is confusion. For all of Coyne’s encouragement, many in the crowd seem perplexed, and although a gorgeously slow version of oldies such as “Race for the Prize” and a melancholic take on “Do You Realize??” were dropped in, the causal fans must have thought they had stumbled into the wrong show. “We need you to get high,” was the frontman’s plea at one point. “At 11:30 p.m. on a school night?! You gotta be kidding,” seemed to be the silent response from some quarters.
But The Flaming Lips shouldn’t be worried. Their experimentations may have lost them the odd fair-weather follower, but they are bringing on board a whole new army of fans who, along with the long-established hard-core fan base, are more than willing to get weird with them.
To people like these, The Flaming Lips are still one of the best rock bands on Earth. And whatever planet they’re from, too.
Prior to the headliners, it was the Tame Impala that turned in an impressive 75-minute set of its own. The Australian band frequently sounds like Brooklyn’s own MGMT taking a magical mystery tour, and such saucer-eyed jams as “Mind Mischief” showed that they’re worthy of sharing the same stage as The Flaming Lips — but nowhere close to blowing them off it.