Though it's sad that major labels no longer have the patience to actively develop deserving artists, they at least know who's good and seem willing to allow musicians with something interesting to say to say it. How else do you explain the career of the Flaming Lips?

Spawned in Oklahoma City in 1983 by Wayne and Mark Coyne, the band has gone through a fair number of stylistic changes over the years without abandoning its peculiar sense of the absurd, a sense that imbues not only its diffuse psychedelic songs but its entire musical personality. The fact that Warner signed them at the start of the '90s when they showed no commercial potential whatsoever is, in a way, the most interesting thing about them.

It's even more interesting when you realize they've become more popular as they've gotten weirder. This year, they've already scored two Top 40 hits in England where their cult, which includes Belle & Sebastian and Robyn Hitchcock, has grown beyond culthood. This despite the fact that Wayne, the creative center of the group (Mark left a long time ago), is determined to dash any expectations you might have about the band. It was therefore both disconcerting and unsurprising that after he, bassist Mike Ivins, and utility man Scott Booker took the stage for the Lips' sold-out Dec. 11 show at the Shinjuku Liquid Room they ran a sound check.

Coyne thanked everyone for their patience and then said that the band would now leave the stage and re-enter. "Please go as crazy as possible," he said, as if explaining the procedures of a police line-up to a witness, "even though I know it's fake."

It's difficult to decide what to make of Coyne's shenanigans. Though the Lips' records avoid beauty for beauty's sake and easy rock platitudes for obvious reasons, the songs are often incredibly beautiful and they definitely rock if you give them the chance.

In concert, however, Coyne seems determined to undermine his music's visceral pleasures with lots of visual and aural distractions. The fact that he clearly didn't take himself seriously, laughing and smiling at his own jokes, didn't help. He could have been laughing at us. I also thought it odd that he kept his winter coat on throughout the show, as if he were ready to bolt out the door at any moment.

When it worked, however, it worked for a reason. "Race for the Prize," the hit single from the new album, "The Soft Bulletin," is an unironic paean to scientific ambition, so it was appropriate to flash Stephen Hawking's visage on the back screen when the opening synth glissandi poured out of the speakers. As the song soared and banked, Herbert von Karajan's passionate form alternated with scenes of atomic destruction, while in the foreground, Coyne literally banged a gong and croaked his heart out to "two scientists . . . racing for the good of all mankind."

The visuals were so striking and well coordinated that I almost missed the image of drummer Steven Drozd when it flashed briefly on the screen. Apparently, he was ensconced somewhere backstage in front of a video camera, listening to his comrades on headphones and playing along.

The sound was loud and brittle, owing mainly to the dominance of keyboards and Drozd's loosely tuned snare. Coyne's vocals are even shakier than Neil Young's, and he tends to overcompensate for his lack of chest tones by squeezing the air out of his lungs. It sounds painful, especially when open heart surgery is being projected on the back screen.

"I'm sorry to play such sad songs so early," Coyne said after several numbers. He then drizzled stage blood on his forehead and sang about how "life without death is just impossible to realize" while zygotes danced behind him, and then donned a snake puppet glove and let the snake sing the last few verses.

Philistine that I am, I kept asking myself, "Where's the guitar?" Coyne's decision not to replace Ronald Jones after the guitarist quit the band in '96 was vindicated by the symphonic sweep of "Bulletin," but in concert I missed the dingy exuberance that Jones lent to "Clouds Taste Metallic," the Lips' 1995 masterpiece. Occasionally, Booker would pick up a guitar and play a pattern, but it was mostly for harmonic effect and did little to fill out the roar.

Even "She Don't Use Jelly," the group's one certifiable hit single in the States, sounded diminished. Coyne is famous for his sonic daring, both in concert (his infamous Parking Lot Experiments) and on record (the monumental "Zaireeka," a set of four CDs engineered to be played simultaneously), but when it comes to just playing the songs, he doesn't realize that they need more than the audience's imagination and clever video loops to come across. Throwing confetti, which he did at the end of "Jelly," didn't do it.

After a wholly gratuitous version of "Over the Rainbow" (dedicated to Cornelius, with whom they had played the previous night), Coyne donned some more stage blood for "Waiting for a Superman," a bittersweet ode to people who save the world (a common theme in Coyne's songs), and then "What is the Light?" which explains love as a photochemical phenomenon and ended with the singer playing a beautiful one-note guitar pattern that lifted the crowd up as the light show from "2001" sparkled on the screen.

Things were improving, and then, after a pretty but anticlimactic version of "When You Smile" it was over. The audience, whose ovations were tinged with a certain desperation, roared for an encore with peculiar vehemence, and Coyne returned with more blood for a bloodless version of "The Spark That Bled," with von Karajan again egging him on from behind. They finished with a straight rendition of "White Christmas" because, according to Coyne, "it's close enough to Christmas to sing a Christmas song without looking like a total fool."

It'll never be that close.