4. The Flaming Lips
The Magical X-Factor An overwhelming familiarity with your own mortality coupled with the devastating realisation that time is limited, love is precious, and there's not a moment to lose. Of course, The Flaming Lips have been making people feel genuinely happy to be alive for three or four decades now, but they remain an absolutely vital live band through acting as an essential force for good in what often feels like a harsh and uncaring world. But if that weren't enough, like Bjork, The Flaming Lips are a band who seem completely unable to do things the safe and easy way. In recent years, their subsequent tours have been so much more than the same-old-same-old but with a few new songs tacked onto the dusty setlist. The Flaming Lips are instead a band who seem intent upon making every single night the best night ever. It doesn't seem as if they'll stop until they've made everyone on the planet realise that, yes,
this whole life thing isn't all that bad after all. And they deliver this message using an arsenal of space bubbles, lasers, confetti, animal costumes, fake blood, puppets, rambling monologues, smoke machines and some of the best rock songs ever written played at such immense volumes that seem designed to make all the bad thoughts leak out of your ears as indistinct and irrelevant trickles of blood.
3. Sigur Ros
The Magical X-Factor This is music. Sigur Ros have such an expansive sound on record that their music often sounds more like a benign force of nature glowing proof in the existence of the divine rather than the fruits of something so mediocre as a bunch of musicians in a studio. Live, they perfectly replicate their sound using as many musicians as it will take horn sections, string sections, choirs but the live setting gives their sound an edgy rawness an extra gravity that simply isn't there in recorded form. When they play live, Sigur Ros do the impossible. They manage to make their already worldly-divine music sound
even more special. Having seen them twice already, these days when I listen to their albums, I find it difficult to believe that I've been in the presence of such people and witnessed them create such sounds live, right before my eyes. It often doesn't feel like the sort of thing of which mere humans would ever be capable. They're the sort of band who'll make you put on your sunglasses indoors, in the dark, at night just so your friends can't see you crying. They reveal a part of you that you thought had been destroyed by the relentless onslaught of the cynical-by-default modern world.