www.flaminglips.com

Talk about taking a long time to break out. The Flaming Lips formed in 1983 in Oklahoma City, but their first brush with fame didn’t come till 11 years later, when the quirky tune “She Don’t Use Jelly” somehow broke into the mainstream a year after the album containing it, Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, was released. Bizarre sonic experiments with equally bizarre song titles made the Flaming Lips hard to fathom, and strange behavior and unfortunate, freakish accidents made them a continual curiosity.

All Music Guide's description of the group as “acid bubblegum” is as good a label as any to try to explain the dancing-about-architecture nature of Wayne Coyne and bandmates, currently co-founding bassist/keyboardist Michael Ivins, multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd, who joined in 1993, and drummer/percussionist Kliph Scurlock, a member since 1999. Showman Coyne handles reedy vocals, guitar, keyboards, assorted other instruments and weird theatrics, like floating in a bubble over crowds, filling the stage with animal- or Teletubbie-costumed characters and various forms of provocative behavior. His bent for weirdness extends to bizarre song and album titles like “Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles” and “Free Radicals (A Hallucination of the Christmas Skeleton Pleading with a Suicide Bomber).” Their bent for brilliance extends to albums like The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and turning a lyric like “Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?” into a song that sounds like a joyous affirmation of life (“Do You Realize?”). Their latest release was a remake of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Perhaps they’ll try to remake that band’s famed flying pig as well. With the Flaming Lips, you never can tell what they’ll think of next.