Latest news with #YoshimiBattlesthePinkRobots
Scotsman
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
The Flaming Lips, Edinburgh review: 'a technicolour extravaganza'
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The Flaming Lips, Usher Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★ Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips |Every Flaming Lips gig is an occasion but this show was a particular celebration of the Oklahoma alchemists' 2002 quasi-concept album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. This joyful, thoughtful collection has inspired a stage musical, though it was hard to imagine a more vivid theatrical performance than the one delivered by the band themselves. 'Three minutes until showtime,' announced a disembodied voice which sounded a lot like frontman Wayne Coyne. Just enough time to play a Cocteau Twins track, emit some excited whoops and inflate some giant pink robots, which were manually swayed during the first song Flight Test. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips |What followed was a rapturous technicolour extravaganza, with rainbow spectrum lasers, pink robot-shaped confetti showers, a dazzling disco ball and an inflatable rainbow. Also, existential pondering on In the Morning of the Magicians, lysergic odes to sentient AI on (One More Robot) and exultant pop paeans to active love (Do You Realize??). And that was just the first half. The post-intermission jukebox choice of The Proclaimers' I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) heralded a second set of fan favourites, kicking off with singalong She Don't Use Jelly, profound in its dorkiness. Playtime props included a petal headdress to rival Peter Gabriel for cosmic country track Flowers of Neptune 6, the time-honoured human hamster ball during sci-fi miniature A Spoonful Weighs a Ton, a Wonder Woman costume for the bittersweet Waitin' For Superman, dancing sun and aliens during The Golden Path, inflatable eyeballs and lips for a turbo-charged take on The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song and many more confetti showers.
Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The Flaming Lips review — five-star show from the Oklahoma surrealists
★★★★★As much fun as the mad professor was having — darting between the legs of three gigantic inflatable pink robots, flinging out man-sized balloons and firing off streamer guns amid flumes of confetti — he did spare a thought for the more baffled at the Brixton Academy in London. 'If you didn't know what you were in for, you're probably thinking, 'What the f*** is going on?'' said Wayne Coyne, introducing a full run through the Flaming Lips' celebrated 2002 space pop opus Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, in which a black belt Japanese office worker fights off an invasion of man-eating hellbots. It's among the Lips' best-loved albums thanks to its folding of pop hooks, folk textures and mainstream electronics into their
The Guardian
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Flaming Lips review – stops and starts make this too much of a good thing
'You could have had a wee and got back,' the chap behind me says to his partner as Wayne Coyne comes to the close of another rambling between-song anecdote in an oddly frustrating, stop-start evening: over the course of two-and-three-quarter hours, there's an awful lot of time when nothing is happening – the gap between She Don't Use Jelly and Flowers of Neptune 6 stretches to seven minutes, what with watching balloons, and Coyne's anecdote about Kacey Musgraves dropping acid. The frustrations start before the band take to the stage. Plainly it is better that Brixton Academy is safe for visitors now, but there must surely be a middle ground where those arriving half an hour before show time don't have to queue for 50 minutes to enter. When the Flaming Lips take to the stage, 15 minutes late, there are still many hundreds outside, and big gaps in the crowd. That's a shame, given that they miss a good chunk of the main purpose of the evening: a complete rendition of the 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. That, too, keeps losing momentum, as assorted stage effects are brought on and off between songs (over the course of the evening we get confetti cannon, streamer guns, mirror balls, video screens, giant balloons, costume changes, giant inflatable pink robots, lasers, inflatable rainbows, swinging lamps and more), and the music pauses for minutes at a time. It being Brixton, the sound is boomy and muddy at first. It settles down – but for 20 minutes there's almost no middle. Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion After an hour, the band leave the stage for a longish interval before a second set, less gauzy and electronically shaped than the Yoshimi material, but just as suffused with the Lips's peculiar ecstasy: Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung may be the only psych-rock song to ponder the upsides of petrification. But the evening is too much of a good thing, especially when 45 minutes could be shed without even losing a song. By the time a glorious Race for the Prize closes the show, the gaps are back in the crowd, last trains calling time long before the band.
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Flaming Lips and Modest Mouse's joint tour plots Minneapolis stop
Minneapolis is getting a dose of out-there indie rock in August. The Flaming Lips and Modest Mouse have announced a co-headlining tour that will bring them to The Armory on Aug. 15. Both groups rose to prominence in the late '90s with records that have become indie rock classics. They exploded in popularity during the early '00s with the breakthrough albums Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and Good News for People Who Love Bad News, respectively. In recent years, both groups ran celebratory tours ringing in the 20th anniversaries of those seminal albums. This time, there are not complete album performances or setlist confines that have been announced. Both groups passed through the Twin Cities last year, with the Flaming Lips supporting Weezer's tour that stopped at Xcel Energy Center and Modest Mouse opening for Pixies at Surly Brewing Festival Field's summer series. This summer's tour will bring the bands to a couple of other hubs in the Upper Midwest, including an Aug. 14 show in Madison and an Aug. 16 date in Chicago. Tickets for the tour go on sale to the public on Friday, March 28, at 10 a.m. An artist presale will start on Wednesday, March 26.
