Friday, March 12, 2010 I saw the Flaming Lips play Austin Music Hall.

It. Was. Phenomenal.

I saw them once before at ACL, but that doesn’t count.

Huge thanks to Jason for the ticket hookup. I procrastinated and missed the ticket sales date.

Physch-rock outfit Stardeath and the White Dwarfs, collaborators on the Dark Side of the Moon project, opened the show. They were great. I usually am annoyed with opening bands, but these guys made the stand-and-hold-your-place part of the show tolerable. Nice use of a theramin.

I guess I’m what you might call a “new Lips” fan. I got into them when Yoshimi came out. And in the three years before At War With the Mystics, I got into Soft Bulletin, Zaireeka, In a Priest Driven Ambulance, and Transmissions From the Satellite Heart. Also, I became a huge fan of the Fearless Freaks film. Needless to say, I was a little disappointed with Mystics. Not a fan of the Sponge Bob influence.

I loved Embryonic. Loved it. Loved. It.

It was weird and spacey and groovy and nostalgic and loud. And great.

And so was the show. My wife likes the Lips’ music, but not the concerts. She says they are “gimmicky.”

Whatever. I went with a friend.

The stage setup was pretty intense. I had heard they had a new “gimmick” for this tour. There was a large half moon disco ball rotating about 10 to 12 feet above our heads (we were maybe 30 feet from the stage), and everything was painted orange. All the dancers were dressed up as DJ Lance from Yo Gabba Gabba, and there were only two inflatables on stage (or the side of the stage due to the limited real estate on the Austin Music Hall stage).

There was a huge sunrise/sunset type projector background that enhanced the light show and played video of various nude girls dancing throughout the show.

The band entered the stage via a shining vagina on the background screen and Wayne immediately jumped in his big space ball and bounced around the audience. It’s old hat by this time, but still a lot of fun.

I don’t remember the set list, but here are the standouts:

• Acoustic sing along version of Yoshimi pt 1
• Waitin’ for a Superman which was dedicated to the late Mark Linkous
• The W.A.N.D.
• She Don’t Use Jelly
• See the Leaves
• Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung
• In the Morning of the Magicians
• Worm Mountain
• And of course, “Do You Realize?”

A little something for everyone.

I had hoped to see them perform “Watching the Planets” after seeing the incredible rendition they did live on Conan, but no, they didn’t. They had the lighted gong contraption out and ready to go, but it got little play. Bummer. I expected the song in the encore, but it didn’t come. After the first encore the crew left the stage set up for a few minutes, maybe expecting a second encore, but everybody was tired of standing and left. Maybe they saved “Watching the Planets” for the second encore. Bummer.

Wayne busted out a retrofitted acoustic guitar with a bubble encapsulating the sound whole for the “Yoshimi” sing along, and he confessed that for that occasion, it was the first time he had played an acoustic guitar live on stage. Really? Factual or not, it was great.

“Waitin’ for a Superman” was dedicated to the late Mark Linkous. It was great. Wayne gave a brief, impassioned anti suicide speech before the song, and performed it with a good amount of emotion. It was very sweet (sweet like a grandma would say, not an X-Games announcer).

The band closed out the show with “Do You Realize?” and everything seemed to shoot out confetti, streamers, balloons, lasers, and lights all at once. It was pretty great. There are pictures bellow.

Gimmicks. They were galore. Everyone in the audience received a laser pointer. It was like 1996 all over again. Lots of bald heads and tig bitties got the laser pointer treatment. At one point in the concert the big screen behind the band told us to point them at Wayne and when we did the lights went down and he suddenly produced a mirror shield and used it to redirect these thousands of lasers into multiple directions. It was a cool effect.

During another song, the lights went down and Wayne magically appeared back at the sound booth wearing gigantic hands with green lasers shooting out of the palms. Also very neat.

There was the huge space ball walk, tons of confetti and streamers, huge balloons bouncing around, and the microphone perspective camera.

In perspective, it was an excellent show. I could have stood for another 30 minutes of music, but when a band has a catalog dating back to the 80s, I imagine it’s hard to play a show and satisfy multiple generations of fans.

Wow. It was a great show. If you went, congrats. If no, boo on you. Go next time.

More photos… from an iPhone.

Ok, who’s ready for part II?

Read part one for the rundown on what’s up here (not much).

Because You Like Beer YOU LIKE TOP 11 BEST RECORDS OF 2009 LISTS! PART TWO!

6. We Were Promised Jetpacks – These Four Walls

So this record pretty much motivated me through a summer internship of migrating content from a legacy agency site to a CMS agency site. It has highs and lows and emotion and intensity and mostly motivation. Enough to keep you going through 40-ish days of copying and pasting the same monotonous government approved copy with less than 10 minutes of actual human interaction per week.

Maybe you have notice by this point that the merits of this list are purely personal.

Listed album=personal nostalgia/connection/memory/preference/shitty taste/etc.,

Seriously, if you can get beyond the sophomoric moniker, this is a great album. To me it sounds like Explosions in the Sky went with their harder stuff, got a vocalist and some balls. It’s emotional enough, but not so much you’re watching Project Runway and eating a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. And vocalist Adam Thompson really comes off like the sort of guy I’d want to share a pint or two with.

5. Sonic Youth- The Eternal

I was highly satisfied with this record.This record featured the return of the groups stolen equipment and that made all the difference from their  2006 release, Rather Ripped, which was somewhere between a let down and a church camp soundtrack.

Did anyone watch Jesus Camp?

The Eternal is all the weird freak out stuff I wanted, a little bit harder and polished at some points, and has a nice does of Kim Gordon’s off putting and sexually charged (“Anti-Orgasm”?!?!)  vocals. This was one of the few records this year that made me fantasize of picking up my Tornado and rocking some jams. Nope, just went out and drank beer.

4. Phoenix- Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

If you don’t like “Listomania” you have no future. Just quite now. If you’re wearing sunglasses take them off cause your future aint bright.

WAP came out in May, and it was just in time. In my opinion, this was one of the better Spring to Summer transition records of all time (how big is that category?)

Phoenix found the perfect medium between quirky and poppy on this record with solid vocals, interesting synths/beats, poppy guitars, and a nice balance between dance music and pop-rock. I’ll even venture to say this is the funnest most fun record on this list of eleven.

3. Sunset Rubdown- Dragon Slayer

OK, I’m not even kidding, Because You Like Beer you should fucking love this record.

Seriously, I just bumped this record from #4 to #3, sorry Phoenix, freedom isn’t free Frenchies (but this band is Canadian?!?! [shut up!])

It’s almost guaranteed (have you ever been able to spell “garunteed” correct the first time?) that I’ll be a fan of anything Spencer Krug is involved with, but this record is amazing on its own. It rocks out, it’s weird, it’s epic, it’s contemplative, I’m venturing into trite descriptives territory, and it’s the third best record of 2009.

In the song “Dragon’s Lair”, Krug pens “I’m sorry that I’m late/I went blind/I got confetti in my eyes/I got held up at yesterday’s parties/I was needed in the congo line” followed by an anthemic “YOU’RE NOT A WIDOW YET.” I don’t exactly know what Krug is singing about in these lines, but I sing them as loud as I can (in my car).

Number three, baby!

2. Modest Mouse – No One’s First and You’re Next

If any of you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you may have caught on that I was working on this big paper last fall. Well, Modest Mouse was the Red Bull to my Five Hour Energy throughout that ordeal. And this record EP was the meat to my Modest Mouse potatoes.

It’s eight songs that have been released at some point between 2005 and 2009, but never as a whole. I like that it covers ground on the various aural landscapes that Modest Mouse treads (Good News for… bluegrass, Smiths/Johnny Marr-ish, OG MM guitar freak-outs, and the softer Ugly Casanova influence).

For as eclectic as the EP is, it’s extremely listenable, especially by Modest Mouse standards. I like that Brock pulls no punches, yet still accomplishes creating something honest and approachable. It gave me hope after the boringly flat We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank.

1. The Flaming Lips- Embryonic

I first heard the Flaming Lips on Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. I liked it a lot, then dug a little further and realized that the guys behind this happy/melancholy-future/nostalgia-doom/hope record used to make music that rocked, too. And I liked that. And then I got excited about the next album, At War With the Mystics, when I heard the single “The Wand”, thinking it might be a return to the Lips’ guitarier stuff.

Nope. It was lame. And even had songs in a Sponge Bob movie and a Dell commercial. Real lame.

So when I began to hear rumors and tidbits (what a weird word) about the new Flaming Lips’ record, I didn’t let myself get excited. I guarded my heart. Just like the Jonas Bros and Miley Sirus I was in Flaming Lips abstinence and pledging my next Flaming Lips experience to to the right Flaming Lips record that God had picked out for me before the blah blah blah.

Then I heard a stream of it on NPR and lost my Flaming Lips purity ring shit.

I remember when it happened. I was at work. It was better than sex at work (I’ve never had sex at work, so that statement can’t be quantified).

The record is loud and weird and brilliant and epic and personal and genius and everything I had hoped for. It’s an excellent mix of the psych-rockout from the earlier In a Priest Driven Ambulance days with the epic sonic-motional surreal-ness of the Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles… era.

Mr. Coyne and Co, it’s good to have you back.

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Hmmk, that’s it. If you made it this far, thanks for reading. Let me know in the comments section if you agree/disagree and feel free to post your top whatever records of 2009.

Cheers!