Girl, You’re So Weird

The Flaming Lips have always been too much in the best way—Wayne Coyne’s voice pitched somewhere between a child and a ghost, the band building cathedrals out of noise and synth wash and pure earnestness. There’s something almost naive about how committed they are to the weird, the experimental, the unapologetically sentimental underneath all the digital glitch and orchestral bloat. You could write them off as novelty, the guy in the giant bubble performing live, the costumes and the props, but that misses what actually matters: they mean every second of it. No irony, no protective distance. Just four guys from Oklahoma making music that sounds like nothing else because they don’t know any better and don’t care to learn. There’s courage in that kind of unguarded strangeness.