Onstage, the lead singer is bleeding.

We're not talking a paper cut here, either. His face is dripping blood. It's streaming down from a huge puddle on his forehead, traversing the tiny patches of skin in his goatee and pouring into his hand. The bleeding seems to stop for a moment, then he turns from the mike and it resumes again. He seems to be a portrait of anguish, a man in intense physical pain. He's been shot.

Yet when Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips sings, his voice yearns and the music surges upward with it. He's not in agony but in ecstacy: "I accidentally touched my head/and noticed that I had been bleeding...What was this, I thought, that struck me?/What kind of weapons have they got?/The softest bullet ever shot..." The mystery is quickly revealed: he's been shot by love, and he's bleeding to death.

Of course, it's fake blood. A broad theatricality, just like the puppets Coyne had employed throughout the evening to mouth his singing, just like the bags of confetti he'd hurled into the crowd for fans to toss into the air whenever the music moved them. Yet there's a sincerity behind the artsy melodrama, a heart beating at the center of the multimedia onslaught. Their lone hit, "She Don't Use Jelly," is dusted off for the evening, but it's a brief celebratory throwaway. It relieves the evening's tension.

Otherwise, the band lathers on layer after layer of music and meaning, crafting devastating sonic landscapes that still make my ears ring two days after the fact. It's not clear whether they're out to uplift or depress--Coyne suggests that the confetti creates a celebratory atmosphere, but later apologizes to the crowd for playing so many sad songs. Yet they never fail to move in one direction or another. The soft bullets never miss their mark.

Maybe the theatricality has something to do with the band's broad songwriting canvas on The Soft Bulletin, the record they're touring to support and the chief material they played last Saturday night at Chicago's Cubby Bear. You can't miss the connections between love and science on the album, and through science to all of the greater issues--the origins of time, the workings of our body, bleeding gashes on your forehead. "Love in our life is just too valuable," Coyne sings on "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate," "oh to feel for even a second without it...But life without death is just impossible." Love is life, and life leads to death, so love leads to death. When you fall, you're shot by that soft bullet, and you bleed. Accidentally touch your head, and your hand falls away bathed in red.

The Flaming Lips are riding a cresting wave of triumph with this record. It manages to be both literal and evocative, and to work on so many different levels. The live incarnation of the album works too, mainly because they've managed to successfully capture the album's difficult sound in a live setting. They do that thanks largely to pre-taped accompaniments, including a videotaped version of their drummer that booms away in the background on many songs.

But it's not just the faithfulness of the sounds--they've conjured the record's subtle textures for their live show as well. There's a primeval boom to the drums, and yet the other sounds seem to float above them, hazy and delicate. It's a slicing wall of sound, and yet you can interpret the instruments and voice working within it. They push the envelope of power in their volume and hit just the right peak; it's the loudest thing you've ever heard, but it falls just short of being too loud.

Above and beyond the music and the songwriting, it's the broad theatrical elements that really edged this show into brilliance. Even as it happened, it felt more like a remembered dream than a reality--the brightly dripping blood on Coyne's forehead, the heads littered with white confetti that glowed in the club's intimate darkness, the massive video screen that formed the backdrop for the band onstage. Big, melodramatic props that fully supported the same broad sweeps in the music.

When you usually think of melodramatic rock, you think of Meat Loaf or Journey. Bloated beasts of music that lumber through your head like a bull in a china shop. The Lips shattered that impression on Saturday night with their own version of rock's desperate melodrama, crafting a passionate canvas covered in confetti, love, death and blood.