If you haven’t ever seen the Flaming Lips, you’re missing out on the greatest rock and roll circus currently existing. Since 1983, the fearless freaks from Oklahoma City have been pushing visual and sonic boundaries, but only in the last decade have they transformed into a grandiose spectacle that still somehow holds fast to the band’s do-it-yourself roots. Bordering on meltdown-inducing sensory overload, the “typical” Flaming Lips experience involves hallucinatory videos, exploding balloons, laser pointers, strobe lights, gong hits, thick shrouds of smoke, aliens and Santa costumes, all of which end up coated in a brightly colored film of confetti. Mind-bendingly psychedelic without being unapproachably abstract, the Lips manage to somehow eschew the ironic route, presenting their over-the-top spectacle as an impressively genuine and moving trip through the joyous (as well as inevitably painful) parts of life on Earth. With Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. GREGORY FRANKLIN

Mon., Sept. 27, 8 p.m., 2010