The Flaming Lips Come Through the Dread at Fillmore, but Just Barely

Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips at The Fillmore in New Orleans, by Steven Hatley

The rock band balances fear and beauty, but it’s not always clear in concert that the two will equal out.

By now, The Flaming Lips’ live show is well-grooved, and it’s not what people who know them from the 20-year-old Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots might think. Sure, “Do You Realize??” faces the reality of death and impermanence, but it doesn’t prepare you for how much time can be spent at a Flaming Lips show meditating on pain and loss. Wayne Coyne doesn’t go there bleakly. Tuesday night at The Fillmore, the band played “Enthusiasm for Life Defeats Existential Fear,” and the song title could double as the band’s mission statement. They encored with “All We Have is Now” from Yoshimi, and that title idea drives everything everything the band does. Coyne framed Tuesday’s show as potentially the last one the band might play because who knows what will happen tomorrow, so they work to make it an experience.

Which it is, as it always has been. The show is unabashedly psychedelic in both high and low tech ways. The rear screen was in constant motion, alive with day-glo  colors, patterns, and the lyrics to the songs while the stage lights behind it shone through. When the band played “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1,” a giant, inflatable robot loomed behind Coyne. The show also deployed a ton of top quality confetti designed for maximum flutter time, and at times Coyne flourished a foil-reflective length of fabric with Christmas lights sewn to it. The combination made the show seem simultaneously otherworldly and homemade, which meant that it always seemed human, even at its outlandish.

That helps because for better or worse, one of Coyne’s through lines for the last 20-plus years has been his cheerleader mode, encouraging the audiences to get up and get energetic, no matter how engaged with the show they are. He explained that there are people in the audience who are dealing with a lot of pain and we need to lend them our energy and enthusiasm, which if taken at face value seemed a little misdirected. If he was really worried about fans and their pain, maybe they could have played fewer songs about pain. But as with almost everything that Coyne does onstage, there’s an idea behind it and at some point you simply sign on or move on. Coyne’s an explainer onstage, which is adds an interesting subtle dimension to their show as someone tries to spell out so much during a concert where so much is inexplicable.

Wayne Coyne in front of an inflatable robot at The Fillmore, by Steven Hatley

Part of the beauty of Tuesday’s show was that the concert as a concept worked. It started on exciting, familiar terms with “Do You Realize??” surprising fans as the second song of the night. Before long though, the dread became very present, particularly in the stretch of “Mother I’ve Taken LSD” and “Assassins of Youth” (both from American Head) and “Always There, In Our Hearts” from The Terror. When Coyne sang, “Always there, in our hearts / Fear of violence and of death,” I snickered, maybe simply out of angst overload or maybe because those songs don’t balance dread with beauty as effectively as other songs do.

By this point, casual fans realized that a lot has happened since The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi. Around the time of Embryonic and The Terror, The Flaming Lips largely stopped trying to court the fans of uplifting, orchestral rock and pursued more gnarled, Krautrock- and space rock-influenced compositions. It suits them well, and in concert the songs throb and pulse, moving with a determination that makes Coyne’s sometimes fragile voice plaintive in contrast. The newer songs are often chillier and dole out the hooks sparingly. That didn’t make the show hard, but these days The Flaming Lips ask you to meet them halfway.

But the work and the grim stretch paid off. Even more than the sing-along “She Don’t Use Jelly,” “Moth in the Incubator” signaled that a mood change was in process. Like a lot of songs from before The Soft Bulletin, “Moth in the Incubator” is more effective streamlined for the live show than it was on Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, where the clatter that fought its signature riff challenged it without offering any pleasure of its own. Tuesday the lovely Beatlesque opening and riff-heavy body of the song delivered simple rock ’n’ roll pleasure with, of course, a soupçon of impermanence.

The encore gave fans the band at its most accessible. Coyne’s stagecraft worked as he explained a toy bird with a shaggy dog story before he flew it over the audience. That turned into “My Autumn Cosmic Rebellion,” which was simultaneously lovely and lonely as it told all the non-conformers in the crowd that their path is a tough but beautiful and rewarding one. After that, “All We Have is Now” and “Race for the Prize” gave fans hot and cold running ascending melodies and an almost absurd amount of uplift. Coyne’s voice has always been a slightly unsteady vehicle, and his fragile treatment of his melodies made them more poignant so that, mixed with a final salvo of weapons-grade confetti, the show felt lovely enough at the end to pay off the journey to it.

The Flaming Lips live in New Orleans at The Fillmore, by Steven Hatley