A Real Lips Smacking Concert at the Palace

Oklahoma’s Flaming Lips are infamous for coaxing seemingly impossible sounds out of the average electric guitar, creating a carnival-like atmosphere of noise. But instead of using its talent for honing bizarre noise as a focal point, the band uses it as a jumping-off point to create cohesive and colorful songs.

Of course, that’s not what you’d expect to hear if all you knew of the band was its MTV hit “She Don’t Use Jelly.” Predictably, it’s one of the Lip’s more straight-ahead, bread-and-butter pop songs, but it’s the one that finally brought the group wide notoriety after a decade of indie-only fame.

Thursday at the Palace, the quartet managed to create a grandiose atmosphere of freewheeling guitar that matched the colorful stage set, showing just how incredible the art of feedback and reverb can be in the right hands.

While the music swirled, skinny frontman Wayne Coyne sang about such appropriate subjects as perpetual motion in crackly, lopsided tones a la Neil Young and Ian Hunter. Coyne and the band played songs that roller-coastered from slippery and sliding to euphorically atmospheric to assaultive.

The stage decor complemented the funhouse sonics with hundreds of colorful twinkling and spinning lights and thousands of machine-generated bubbles.

Coyne chatted in between numbers about his inspiration for the subject matter of his songs, and his stories were just as bizarre as his lyrics--i.e. images of water bugs attacking policemen. It was a sure mark that the band’s recent hit was in no way a sign of things to come. The Flaming Lips are defiantly twisted, and in this case, that’s a good thing.

The stripped-down pop of North Carolina’s Archers of Loaf, who played in between the Lips and the British openers Beatnik Filmstars, may be at the center of yet another obligatory industry buzz, but while the quartet’s low-fi sound is catchy, it’s also predictably Pavement-esque.