Photo Credit: Adam Baker

The Flaming Lips are pointing the year 2017 in a very cool, very strange and very, very great direction. While this writer may be a bit biased, for Boston played host to the Lips last night: and she (meaning I)  was there, and it was, of course, EPIC. Needless to say, when assignments came in this morning, the new release for the Oklahoma-native’s video “There Should Be Unicorns” was thrilling, and well…fitting. “Strange, dreamlike and lurid, the video features THE LIPS in typically Faustian imagery echoing the warm & fuzzy OCZY MLODY condition.”, says The Flaming Lips themselves.

To make a long story short, the new Flaming Lips video is not unlike what many are finding within the two-hour set on the current OCZY MLODY international tour. Enter Wayne Coyne…looking sexier than ever clad in rainbow wings that almost, or most definitely look like lips. There is an onslaught of colors, rainbow lights, and sparkles. And, Steven Drozd, as expected, spends a fair amount of time in the video inhabiting some kind of conceptual time wharp. But, the cherry-on-top is really summed up by the light-up unicorn Coyne rides into the audience, or onto film set in both.

Thus, the video, like a Flaming Lips live-performance on their current tour, is nothing particularly “new” for the band, i.e. lots of life: lots of fun; but, what both concert and video accomplish is entertaining fans of the group in ways that most bands (new or old) are quite possibly just plain old too scared to do. And that’s why the Lips keep sticking around, and that’s why There Should Be Unicorns, the sixth single/video from the group’s 2017 release of OCZY MLODY is a must-see: AND, that’s why everyone should see The Flaming Lips on their current, not-so alternative, but obviously alternative tour this year.