I suppose The Terror is so unbearably sad for Flaming Lips fans that Wayne Coyne now has to placate them. From atop his platform Saturday night at Forecastle, he looked down at his audience fanned out on the riverfront and told them, “Don’t be sad.”
I’d drunk too many beers to be sad. And I’ll say the best thing about Forecastle is that it’s not Bonnaroo, a festival where, attending any given show, you miss five others you wanted to see. Forecastle is limited to four main stages and you miss nothing, whether it’s standing next to a guy furtively licking his hand in the pit at Nosaj Thing or watching a larger-than-life Hunter Thompson creation, situated on the shoulders of someone from a local theatre troupe, come through the crowd glowering from beneath the brim of a bucket hat.
Or watching the sun set on Jim James, whose set was pretty much a more instrumental My Morning Jacket. The stage looked like Atlantis against a soft sky, lights sprayed out in a watery empire. His voice, which sounded like it was wavering from a thousand miles away underwater, seeped out and went floating down the river . . .
But I came to see Flaming Lips.
The Lips are a band I’ve always listened to, thanks to an older brother. They colored my childhood in green and purple, and I’d always thought of them as something between Pink Floyd and The Who. But I’d never seen them live; not even tales of wild theatrics, hamster balls and fake blood had lured me to a show.
They opened with The Terror’s “Look . . . The Sun Is Rising,” and continued with a set that was barely an album’s length and heavy on The Terror. I don’t mind. Maybe because I’ve never been to a Lips show prior to their latest album’s release, and while playing In a Priest Driven Ambulance straight through would have undoubtedly thrilled me, I have always been a fan of growers, which The Terror most certainly is. The record is slow-going, gradual, creeps up on you, and by the time you wake up to it, it’s grown to 10,000 feet and still expanding exponentially.
They pulled from Embryonic as well and did a fucking fantastic cover of Devo’s “Gates of Steel,” which, I’d never realized until right then, is actually perfectly suited to their style.
Silhouetted against a backdrop of lights flashing abusively, Coyne looked like an ethereal specimen in a glowing terrarium, and sang in a voice not unlike a mosquito’s whine—which in theory sounds annoying but is in fact wrenching—with arms outstretched. If there was a heaven, he was pulling at its strings, and as the set wrapped with him asking us did “we realize?” there was an unexplainable and overwhelming feeling of something impending that was both disastrous and revolutionary, but monumental.
