Flaming creatures

The Flaming Lips headlining Noise Pop — it may be the only thing in the band's strange and twisted 23-year musical journey that makes any sense. Like the event, the Flaming Lips are difficult to categorize — they're guys that restlessly crawl out of any box you try to place them in. Then, like a bunch of overgrown children at play, they'll start beating on the box, drawing designs on it with fake blood, ripping pieces off, and tossing them to the crowd to use as noisemakers, all while filming the proceedings with a tiny camera implanted in vocalist Wayne Coyne's microphone.

That's what it's like to watch a Flaming Lips show. First you're in a room filled with huge, colorful, bouncing balloons, singing along with their cover of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," then you're watching people they drag onstage propose to their lovers. Next you're listening to songs from their supercool 2002 Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots album (Warner Bros.) or their hit single "She Don't Use Jelly," while Wayne's face drips with fake blood and confetti cannons fire into the air. Then the Lips unleash an earnest and heartfelt plea against the war before launching into their closer: Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" (a sequence I watched them perform on the Xingolati cruise in October with a big grin plastered on my face the entire time). Or the band might just go off on some weird, experimental tangent, playing four tracks from different albums simultaneously, drifting from cacophony to synchrony.

What will happen at Bimbo's? Who knows? But as one of the most original and offbeat live acts out there, it might just be something you shouldn't miss. (Steven T. Jones)

THE FLAMING LIPS

With Stardeath and the White Dwarfs and Midlake

Mon/27, 7:30 p.m.

Bimbo's 365 Club

1025 Columbus, SF

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(415) 474-0365