Album Review

Flaming Lips – UFOS At The Zoo DVD

• 21st Oct 2007

Wayne hugs a seal! This is special, and you know it from just the first song – ‘Race For The Prize’. The whole thing just makes you smile.

All the band emerge from an awesomely impressive backdrop of a spaceship except for Wayne Coyne (that would be too routine an entrance for him obviously) so he decides to walk down from the top of the ship into the crowd in his massive balloon.

He’s possibly the most charismatic front man in music. He launches fireworks into the crowd, dons himself with blood, sings with a hand-nun and gets hugged by enormous plastic hands. All of these old staple props that the band have used in previous gigs are welcomed back by the crowd as warmly as any of the songs that they accompany. The simple fact is the tracks just wouldn’t be the same without the visuals.

‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Part 2’, ‘Free Radicals’ and in particular an astonishing ‘Do You Realize?’ are incredible, as is the wonderfully ridiculous spaceship/Ferris wheel of light behind the band.

This is a party in the truest sense of the word. It’s so overblown that it’d be easy to think the Lips were taking the piss but the devotion and adoration that they inspire in their fans proves that they’re not. Well, that and the fact they’ve got one of the finest back catalogues in modern day American rock.

This is an amazing DVD with extras that let you mess around with the ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah Song’ and turn it into whatever you like and also allows you to save all the gig as an mp3 – even the backstage stuff and interviews with fans. It feels like everything was thought of to make this perfect for the fan, with even some of the gig looking like it was filmed from the middle of the crowd.

This release will either make you glow with joy and warmth every time you watch it or it’ll make you bitter and angry that you weren’t lucky enough to nip across to Oklahoma for this amazing homecoming spectacle. Damn near essential for anyone who’s ever been, or wanted to go, to a Flaming Lips concert.