Longtime indie rock bands Modest Mouse and The Flaming Lips teamed up to dazzle the Santa Barbara Bowl for their appropriately named, It’s Summertime 2025 tour. A picture perfect Friday night (Sept. 5) set the stage to leave no stone unturned for both bands to let loose.
Modest Mouse, led by frontman Isaac Brooks, took the stage and wasted no time getting into the setlist with their popular song “Float On.” Fans immediately rose up from their seats to sing along to the easy loving mega-hit. In a way, it felt as if the band was relieved of playing their most popular song, allowing Modest Mouse to dive into their early music from prior to the band’s commercial success. This included songs like “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine,” where Brooks’s gritty vocals sounded just as great as they do in the recordings. “You know, for Modest Mouse, they’re pretty loud,” someone below me said to their partner.
Towards the back-end of the show, hit song “Dashboard,” one of Modest Mouse’s newer songs, kept the crowd pumping. The 15-song show covered the span of decades of music by Modest Mouse, but I was bummed out they didn’t play “Lampshades on Fire,” as it’s my personal favorite song of theirs.
While Modest Mouse was a little more restraining with their showmanship, The Flaming Lips truly transformed the Bowl into a lucid psychedelic dream. Frontman Wayne Coyne started the night performing selections from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, as he stood adjacent to four inflatable pink robots who swayed along to the music. As the robots stood over 15 feet tall, Coyne pranced around the stage as he threw massive confetti filled balloons into the crowd, all while confetti spewed out of cannons under the stage. A thrilling way to start a show, this made it clear fans were in for a great night.
As the night continued, the set explored the Lips’ expansive catalog, highlighted by a vivid rendition of “Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung.” The song was performed along a wicked light show that lit up the Bowl as Coyne began swinging his microphone up in the air as if he were throwing a lasso mid-way through the song. Coyne was engaging with the roaring crowd playfully throughout the night, after almost every cheer he encouraged fans to “keep it going, keep it going” repeatedly throughout the performance…