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QUALITY VS. QUANTITY
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It’s called moe.down, and every Labor Day weekend for the past four years it’s brought thousands of neo-hippies to the Snow Ridge Ski Area in Turin, New York (not too far from Lake Ontario), for three days of camping, carousing, and lots of music. A good deal of that music is generated by the band called moe., who spell their name in a way that drives copy editors crazy and play the kind of jam-band music that generally drives semi-reformed punk-rockers like myself crazy. But once you leave the confines of Boston clubland and enter the open-skied wilderness of the Berkshires, well, the punk fades and the notion of thousands of Jerry’s kids grooving along a giant hillside in the Adirondacks doesn’t seem quite so bad. Which is not to suggest that I would have even considered driving the 300-plus miles if it hadn’t been for one name on the bill — the Flaming Lips. moe. (see how annoying it looks at the start of a sentence) were, of course, the featured attraction, and between their own original tunes and an endless number of covers, they were able to dominate the headlining spot every night. The result resembled a musical endurance test, and moe.’s endurance was nothing short of impressive. There they were Sunday night, dutifully signing autographs, looking a little bleary-eyed, for sure, but still grinning their way through what must have been a taxing weekend. But what most impressed me about moe. was their bringing in the Flaming Lips for an 8 p.m. set on Saturday night, just as the sun had set over the mountains. The Lips, an oddball band from Oklahoma City who had an oddball hit with "She Don’t Use Jelly" back in the alterna-’90s, have quietly made some of the world’s most engaging and appealing experimental pop over the past decade, creating a series of "boombox symphonies" (which featured dozens of synchronized portable tape players conducted by Lips frontman Wayne Coyne) and releasing a set of four CDs that are meant to played simultaneously. They had something more traditional in mind for moe.down4: an hour-long set, including "She Don’t Use Jelly," performed in what passed for a normal setting for a severely abnormal band. A giant video backdrop projected images of everything from eye surgery to slow-mo shots of a topless woman dancing to close-ups of Coyne using various puppets and toys (including a pair of "Hulk Hands" he’d transformed into "Wayne hands" by scrawling "love" and "hate" across the knuckles of each giant hand). Flanking the band was a menagerie of furry friends dressed up as lions, Tigger™, and bears, as well as a panda, the Pink Panther™, and, incongruously, a nun. When two of the costumed creatures turned out to be members of moe. who revealed themselves to join the Lips in covering a pair of Pink Floyd tunes, the synergy between the two bands became apparent. You might even conclude that moe. and the Lips reside at opposite ends of the same pop spectrum: moe. use challenging grooves and impressive chops to create a communal experience; the Lips employ disorientingly psychedelicized waves of sensory overload to achieve much the same effect. Coyne as much as said so in one of his frequent soliloquies, as he urged us to sing along even if we didn’t know the words. The best news of all, though, is that after performing for close to two years with a DAT machine, the Lips once again have a real human behind a real drum kit. So as the four-man band launched into the swaying anthem "Flight Test" (from their latest EP, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, on Warner Bros.) and giant balloons began to drift from the stage, there was real power behind Coyne’s epic pronouncements of uncertainty ("I thought I was smart/I thought I was right/I thought it better not to fight/I thought there was a virtue in always being cool . . . "). And you got the sense that even the guys in moe. knew they’d be hard-pressed to provide such a profound musical experience — that they’d be relying more on quantity than on quality.
BY MATT ASHARE
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