Lips Service

Subject: Sade. Style: Silk-voiced chanteuse. Target audience: sophisticated lovers, amorous cinematic couples. Genre: uniquely timeless jazzy pop.

Subject: Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips. Style: High-pitched yelp shaken by quivering quirks. Target audience: adventurous recreational substance abusers, rock critics. Genre: uniquely futuristic baroque pop.

She’s peanut-butter smooth, and he don’t use jelly, so until recently, Sade and Coyne have never shared a sentence. But on the Lips’ latest disc, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Coyne’s group crafts grooves that flow like liquid, and the singer’s once-jarring vocals float over them without making a ripple. He’s oiled away every squeak, perfected an upper-register glide and, on several songs, comes closer to replicating Sade’s delivery than any 41-year-old white indie icon from Oklahoma should even be able to conceive, let alone execute. Then again, this is no ordinary band. Some fringe-friendly musicians consider chart-darling records to be a not-so-sweet taboo, but the Lips’ members openly embrace everything from Madonna to Glenn Campbell.

“We listen to so many different types of music and try to pull them in,” explains Stephen Drozd, a multi-instrumentalist who plays drums, keyboards and guitars and makes countless other contributions to the Lips’ ornately layered material. “If you talk to Wayne, he’ll say, ‘Look, dude, I’ve been trying to be a good singer since day one,’ but the character of his voice is just more appealing now. For this record, we thought, What if Wayne sang like Dusty Springfield or Sade? Wouldn’t that be fucking kick-ass?“

The image of the Flaming Lips singing along with such sounds subverts some expectations, but the revelation that the trio’s boldly psychedelic, mind-melting epics originate from a drug-free environment might freak out its addled following more than an enormous hallucinated insect.

“Those guys have never even smoked pot,” reports Drozd. “Everyone just assumes they gravitate toward that. People will come up and tell Wayne all these wild drug stories, and he’ll just say, ‘You better be careful.'”

When Drozd joined the Lips eleven years ago, he was as surprised as anyone to learn that Coyne and his musical partner, Michael Ivins, were clean and sober. But he didn’t dwell on this discovery for long, because he was obsessed with a far more substantial stunner: One of his favorite bands was asking him for song ideas. The group was already a well-established oddity by the time Drozd entered the fold, and until the shock wore off, he greeted most invitations for input with a meek “Are you sure? You guys were doing fine without me.”

However, Drozd improved the group’s efforts exponentially. “Wayne used to imagine big strings and crazy horns, but he didn’t know how to get what he wanted,” Drozd says. “I’ve helped them to realize anything in their imagination. I’ve always been into complicated chord progressions and harmonically weird stuff. I’m a big music dork.”

Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, his first full-length with the band, polished the hooks from its earlier work without dulling the jagged edges. A multifaceted masterpiece that’s readily available in used CD bins thanks to one-hit-wonderers who played only “She Don’t Use Jelly,” this 1993 record briefly introduced the band to MTV, Beverly Hills 90210 (the Lips played the Peach Pit) and Candlebox fans (it opened for the grunge also-rans). The equally appealing Clouds Taste Metallic followed in 1995, earning the band enough of a critical and commercial cushion to convince its label, Warner Brothers, to green-light Zaireeka — four discs designed to be played simultaneously. Recently rereleased, that set has sold more than 20,000 copies and spawned countless quadraphonic parties, including one hosted by the Brick just a few weeks ago.

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“We got a letter from Tokyo from some people who rented this warehouse space, put in four massive stereo systems and had this huge ecstasy-and-acid Zaireeka party,” Drozd says. “We get letters from people all the time who do that kind of thing, freaks in Berlin and London. It’s awesome.”

Drozd promises the Lips will play a Zaireeka track at its KC stop, though he offers no specifics regarding the format. (Past shows employed a variety of boomboxes to achieve the desired sonic effect, with headphones distributed to audience members for additional fidelity.) Each album from Drozd’s tenure in the group will be represented, including 1999’s stellar orchestral epiphany The Soft Bulletin and Pink Robots.

Oddball title aside, there’s no Lips schtick on Pink Robots that rivals the tangerine/magazine/Vaseline goofiness of “She Don’t Use Jelly.” Coyne delves into some weighty philosophical issues, pondering the existence of love, the precariousness of life and the occasional necessity of self-defense. Three songs address the titular tale of black-belt Yoshimi engaging in combat with evil androids, and even this seemingly uplifting scenario contains a profoundly sorrowful passage. “One More Robot” introduces model 3000-21, a programmed killer who, Coyne explains, wants to be more than a machine. Capable of feeling synthetic emotions, the robot falls in love with Yoshimi and ensures her victory by committing suicide, a decision dramatized by a stark symphonic reprise of the tune’s melody. Swelling strings represent his growing affection for his opponent; sad synthesized squiggles voice his final cries. Coming on the heels of Grandaddy’s tearjerker “Jed the Humanoid,” in which a neglected creation shuts down its own system, this instrumental eulogy reinforces the strange depressive power of self-extinguished artificial intelligence.

“You just get a bleak, dismal feeling from thinking about that kind of stuff, which I think is awesome,” Drozd says.

The pace picks up immediately with the title track, a perky pro-Yoshimi pep rally, then peaks with a wordless reenactment of the battle that uses crescendos and cresting dynamics to depict the brief struggle and Yoshimi’s lingering doubts about the ease of her victory.

In addition to four Pink Robots selections, the Lips will play a special cover, which might or might not be the band’s deliriously warped rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” Drozd isn’t spoiling that surprise, but he does reveal that the showstopping version of the Wizard of Oz standard that the Lips played in Lawrence two years ago had nothing to do with Kansas’ rainbow connection. “I should’ve lied, though,” he says. “It would’ve been a crowd-pleaser.”

As always, the Lips’ show will feature crowd-pleasers galore, including video footage and numerous props, and neither the sun (in case the group inexplicably has to go on before nightfall, it’s prepared a Day-Glo version of its performance) nor the Unlimited Sunshine Tour’s multiband format (Cake, Kinky, De La Soul and Modest Mouse fill out the bill) will lessen its impact. “We’ll play for 55 minutes, so our fans won’t feel like they’ve been cheated,” Drozd assures. “And we’ve got lots of visual treats in store.”

Also, Drozd will be playing live drums, an onstage rarity given that the band traditionally uses prerecorded percussion tracks to free its members for other tasks. “We just went on tour in England, and I was playing drums live for the first time since 1996,” Drozd says. “I was so excited that I just beat the shit out of them.”

Drozd’s brutal battery of his kit, in addition to Coyne’s majestic concepts and Ivins’ artfully frazzled riffs, has made the Flaming Lips one of rock’s most admired outfits. With some acts, the influence is transparent. “You hear bands take certain elements of our music to the fore; like, they’ll focus on the distorted vocals or a certain riff or drum sound,” Drozd says. Other groups adapt the Lips’ attitude without copping its sound. “A lot of bands that sound nothing like us cite us as a group that can keep evolving,” Drozd says. Paying homage to the members’ own idols, Drozd’s group does some of both, placing, say, a Sade-style croon into a dazzlingly original context. It’s an approach that incorporates influences while preserving creativity, ensuring that after two decades of challenging experimentation, the Flaming Lips’ members remain smooth operators.