The Flaming Lips Know Something You Don’t

Wayne Coyne has always had a gift for making strangeness feel like tenderness. The Flaming Lips—Oklahoma City’s great psychedelic export—built their whole mythology on that tension, dressing cosmic dread and mortality in confetti and animal costumes until it became something you could actually stand to look at. "Girl, You’re So Weird" lands exactly where you’d expect from them: affectionate, slightly unhinged, a little besotted. By 2012 the band was deep in one of their most prolific stretches, releasing more material than anyone could keep up with, collaborating with everyone from Kesha to Nick Cave. The warmth bleeds through no matter how far out they push the sound.