Concert review: Flaming Lips' Freakout 5

Four years later, The Flaming Lips are still doing The Freakout, and it's just as fun, exciting and unpredictable as the first, and just like The Flaming Lips' respective years, no two have been the same. Whether it be performing "The Dark Side of the Moon" or "The Soft Bulletin" in its entirety, Oklahoma City's favorite freaky sons have made sure to offer something new to their faithful fans.

This year found The Freakout changing more than ever, expanding to two nights and bringing along music/art/historical legend Yoko Ono for the ride.

A venue change from the Cox Convention Center to the much smaller Coca-Cola Bricktown Events Center might have cut the capacity by well more than half, but the energy remained high as ever, if not more caustic and palpable scrunched up in a room that is big by most band's standards but was practically dwarfed by the band's outdoor amphitheater's worth of sound and lighting production.

If you have never seen a Lips' show, you should (fan or no). They play each song like it's the last, like a firework display that's all finale from start to finish. That's an especially apt comparison, given the fact that the band's propensity for visual performance more than meets its knack for an aural one; one stumbles into the room to find balloons as big as Smart Cars dangling from the ceiling, a web of Christmas lights, six lighting towers and a massive, sun like half disco ball … and that's just out amongst the crowd.

A colossal lighted video screen archway and backdrop breathes still more life into the scene, readily shuffling through images and clips ranging anywhere from color patterns to naked-as-a-jaybird females.

Speaking of which, the band emerged from one such figure's — let's say —nether regions during their grand entrance; the crowd yelped in anticipation as bassist Michael Ivins, multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd, drummer Kliph Scurlock and guitarist Derek Brown crossed the threshold. The audience erupted into a barely-contained pandemonium as front man Wayne Coyne slowly writhed up from the ground in his signature blowup orb, promenading into the crowd as it reached full inflation in the midst of the band performing a cover of Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf."

As if this wasn't enough, The Lips launched into the raucous "Worm Mountain" with a balloon drop and hurricane blasts from the confetti cannons mounted on each side of the stage. Coyne dosed the crowd — which pulsed in time with Scurlock's insidious drumbeat — with still more confetti courtesy of his streamer gun. A drunken sing-along followed with more melodic anthems "She Don't Use Jelly" and "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song," before Coyne halted the show to countdown to 2012, but not before calling up Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band to join in with The Flaming Lips and crowd on John Lennon tracks "Give Peace A Chance" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)." This short interlude and subsequent New Year's countdown was sweet and sincere, far and away the most touching moment of the evening.