Last Call: Let's Take A Moment To Appreciate The Flaming Lips

Tonight I get to see The Flaming Lips play at the newish KettleHouse Amphitheater in Missoula and I couldn't be more stoked. Last time I saw them was at Chicago's Riot Fest in 2014, and their performance was a collage of inflatable mushrooms and rainbows and awesomeness. Hopefully this time around is even more mind-blowing. [Kate Bernot]

Proving once again that Kate and I have the same taste in music, I am also a Flaming Lips fan from way back. Honestly, they've kind of lost me in their current incarnation with their huge, psychedelic fests (like where Kate is going tonight). But they had a really sweet streak of albums in the '90s, with pop-powerful yet trippy cuts like "Turn It On" and "Shine On, Sweet Jesus," culminating with the brilliant Soft Bulletin in 1999. But a song they haven't played in years goes even further back than that: "With You," from the band's 1986 debut Hear It Is. The track is basically just a straight-up lovelorn rant, but the frequently out-of-control guitars hint at the insane musical universe Wayne Coyne and the Lips were destined to create. [Gwen Ihnat]

I've been on record about the importance of Ben Folds Five in my life. Here's the trio with a reimagining of The Flaming Lips' "She Don't Use Jelly"—a campy, loungey, more lush, and melodically unrecognizable cover of the original. [Kevin Pang]