Burton Cummings Theatre
September 21, 2010
People love a spectacle, and on Tuesday a spectacle is what people got as the Flaming Lips brought their raucous live show to Winnipeg’s Burton Cummings Theatre along with Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. It was loud, it was long, but most of all it was fun.
The evening began with L.A.’s Ariel Pink, who brought his DIY bedroom-recording aesthetic on stage for the first time in Winnipeg. One of the strengths of Ariel Pink’s entire project is its ability to force people to think critically about what they’re listening too. It doesn’t take long upon hearing The Doldrums or Worn Copy to notice that something is going horribly wrong in this music. His music is almost always a bloody mess, through which the listener is invited to wade through discovering one hell of a good song. In concert, this mess was brought even further to the forefront. Whether it was through technical difficulties, off-key singing, or at times atrocious sound quality (done, I believe, both intentionally and unintentionally), Ariel Pink’s set kept the audience off-balance as everything appeared at all times on the verge of utter collapse. What surprised me most about this was that, in actually fact, it made for an even more rewarding live experience. Ariel Pink is sloppy. In fact in many ways it’s his sloppiness that makes him so loveable – introducing a sense of struggle and chaos into his blissful pop songs. Well on Tuesday, while blazing through a set comprised almost exclusively of songs from this year’s killer record Before Today, (the lone exception being “Gettin’ High in the Morning” from 2006’s House Arrest) it was Ariel Pink’s sloppiness that shone through most clearly.
And then there were the Flaming Lips. Exploding onto stage through the open legs of a woman projected onto their extremely large background screen, the Flaming Lips pummeled the crowd with a 2-hour set of some of their most jarring psychedelic songs. It was ridiculous. There were confetti cannons, giant balloons, streamers, a bear, giant hands with lasers shooting out of them and of course the space ball, all vying for the audiences full attention in front of an endless barrage of strobe lights (so powerful that it warranted a warning from Lips lead-singer Wayne Coyne prior to the concert), and dizzying video projections. It was a spectacle.
Unfortunately, as amazing, and as fun as the stage show was, the songs themselves were less so. Put blankly, the set-list could have been better, as the band decided to go, for the most part, with upbeat and in your face songs leaving out many of the more subtle elements of their catalog. (Nothing from The Soft Bulletin? Really???) They wanted to blow us all apart, and their song selection was indicative of that, with the strongest moments coming from songs such as “She Don’t Use Jelly” or “The Sparrow Looks Up at The Machine.” What this made for in turn, was a tempo that simply could have been better maintained. That said, given how awesome the stage show was, the concert turned out to be a total blast, exciting for even the most stubborn of fans.
Jeff Friesen