Oh Yoshimi

I saw the Flaming Lips last night at the Station Square Ampitheater in Pittsburgh. Overall, it was a pretty enjoyable show (and thank you very much to Catharine for buying me a ticket as our anniversary present). I hadn't seen the Flaming Lips before, and I'm glad I have. As the picture indicates, their shows are pretty big spectacles: lots of multi-colored balloons, tons of confetti, and singer Wayne Coyne in an inflatable plastic "space bubble" which he uses to walk across the stage and the first few rows of the audience.

There were a couple of problems with the show. First of all, the venue is absolutely terrible. Basically, it's just a parking lot by Station Square. No permanent stage or structures of any kind, no grass, just a big slab of concrete. It had nice views of downtown Pittsburgh, I'll grant it that, though. The band started shortly after 9 and played until about 10:45, ending with "Do You Realize??"--but no encores. That was sort of surprising. They also really didn't play that many songs, preferring to do looooooooong versions of the songs that they did play. There usual mode was to play a song, come to a false ending, and then play the chorus two or three more times in a big audience singalong. This works well if you do it once or twice, but any more than that and it wears a little thin. I mean, come on guys, let's hurry this thing up and play "Waitin' for a Superman," "What is the Light?," and "It's Summertime." But, perhaps because they spent so much time doing other stuff, they didn't get to any of those songs, which happen to probably be my three favorite tunes of theirs.

I shouldn't complain so much, because there were some definite highlights. I was surprised that they played "She Don't Use Jelly," but they managed to breathe some life into this song, even if it's about 17 years old by now. "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1" sounded great in the acoustic version of it that they played, and it was nice that the entire crowd sang along to the whole song. "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" was somehow far less annoying live than it is on record--in fact I actually kind of liked it live. They ended with the obligatory "Do You Realize??"--which is apparently the official state rock song of Oklahoma. They took a bow, left the stage, "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong came on the PA, and people started to leave. But Wayne kept coming back onstage to wave to the crowd. He faked a good number of us out, who thought that they must be coming back to play an encore. But after about 4 or 5 curtain calls and waves, they turned on the audience lights and we all filed back to the parking lot.

Overall, I had a great time. But I've gotten to like The Flaming Lips quite a lot and I was expecting their live show to be pretty incredible. Visually, it was pretty great. But it wasn't quite up to snuff musically.