The Flaming Lips, Royal Albert Hall, London <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

"I think," says The Flaming Lips' singer, Wayne Coyne, gazing up at the balloons floating among the audience, "that's the longest the balloons have ever lasted."

But the real wonder of the Lips' London comeback show is how the gonzoid psych-rockers from Oklahoma continue to rise. It took the self-designated "fearless freaks" 15 years to reach their breakthrough album in 1999, the sublime The Soft Bulletin. Since then, they have continued to outdo themselves on every album and tour, never settling for repetition.

Anyone who had already seen the Lips live might wonder how they could top their earlier outings, which ranged from shows in parking lots using car stereos, to headphone concerts and the widescreen riot of the 2002-03 tour for their Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots album. But, just as the questioning spirit of the Lips' 11th album, At War with the Mystics, raises their game, so does the new show.

"If we can do two or three things at a time," Coyne says, "then we can really have a time of it." With several things happening at once and each song approached as an event, a time is really had, indeed. It's difficult to know where to look once the show bursts into life. There's not just big balloons all over the crowd; there's Coyne, too, borne aloft on outstretched arms in an inflatable ball. On stage, as the night goes on, there are streamer guns, confetti cannons, psychedelic films, more balloons, strobes and torch-lit battles between the dancing Santas at stage right and the dancing alien Scientologists on the left.

In the middle of all the mounting madness, the Lips' music rises to the occasion. "Race for the Prize" sweeps you up in its twinkly slipstream, before "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" is turned into a rousing sing-along. "In the Morning of the Magicians" sees Coyne bent at the knees, his falsetto cracking as he croons to the balcony of love and hate, hands clutching at answers. The effect induces total audience involvement: if the balloons don't reach the rafters, songs like that do.

The new tracks are no less glorious. "Vein of Stars" is played as a space-walk symphony under a mirrorball, soaring on the cusp of Coyne's falsetto and Steven Drozd's wah-wah guitar. But Mystics is, at least in part, a protest album, and the bass-heavy psych-funk of "Free Radicals" and acid-stomp freak-out of "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" are spat out hard enough to shake Downing Street. A bullish, strobes-and-megaphone charge through "The W.A.N.D." even leaves Coyne teetering. "That was cool, yeah?" he asks at its sudden close.

Accessories aside, there's real depth and daring in these songs. "Do You Realize??" is a heart-stopping set-closer about loving life in the face of death, exploding in a psych-pop rush. Few, if any, large bands right now can lay claim to so sublime a mix of beauty and intelligence. In the set's other 10 songs, the Lips pair profundity and pranks, melody and experiment, ambition and achievement, touching down on politics, science, free will, love, hate, morality and mortality as they go. After a wedding proposal enacted on stage and a sing-along about Cher's hair, you wonder what more you can ask of a band.

Quibbles, then? Maybe. It's a minor gripe, but the lengthy gaps between songs tend to sap a little momentum on this night. The encore cover of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" is muscular but slightly wrong, too, particularly when the Lips don't play their own timeless "Waitin' for a Superman", and when their own protest songs have more scrappiness and subtlety simultaneously.

By and large, though, Coyne and co fill you with faith in their ability to mix spectacle with great sonic scope and a searching spirit. Most of the balloons settle at the first balcony, but for the Lips, the sky looks the only limit.