(Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Records)This week The Flaming Lips released “With a Little Help from My Fwends” a track-by-track adaption of The Beatles’s “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The album features a huge list of guest stars including Miley Cyrus, My Morning Jacket, Dr. Dog, Foxygen and many more.
“With a Little Help from My Fwends” is not first album on which The Flaming Lips have delved into popular tunes from the past; its 2009 cover of “Dark Side of the Moon” gave the iconic Pink Floyd songs the raucous and cosmic feel that only The Flaming Lips can provide. Nor is it the first time the band has called upon its “Fwends” for help; in 2012, it released “The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends” featuring guests such as Kesha, Bon Iver and Tame Impala.
Here, with the "Sgt. Pepper’s” cover, the band attempts to breathe new life into the songs of an album often considered the best ever made. Some of the new adaptions truly impress me, providing a sort of nostalgic feeling, but a few seem to lack this magic. In the latter group, my disappointment is almost solely due to the choice of guest stars.
Let’s start with the good.
The album opens with the title track which features My Morning Jacket, Fever the Ghost and J Mascis. It comes off as a fuzzy interpretation of the original, but is sung in a much higher key and features a waltz-like bridge before kicking into the chorus. The vocalist switches three times, which prepares you for the chaos that is the rest of the album.
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” features Miley Cyrus on lead vocals and Moby on backup vocals. This seems to be the shining star on the album. Cyrus does a great job making the song her own, but the use of vocal effects remind us of the earlier Lennon version, creating this perfect middle ground for a cover tune. The middle of the album is when I really started to have fun with the adaptions. “Fixing a Hole” features Electric Würms, which is a side project of The Flaming Lips’s multi-instrumentalist, Steven Drozd, and lead singer Wayne Coyne. Its creepy, distant lyrics and acoustic guitar create something entirely separate from the original; it sounds brilliant. “She’s Leaving Home” includes a drum machine that fits perfectly behind Phantogram's Sarah Barthel’s voice.
Both “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” and “When I’m Sixty-Four” feel like you are standing on the cusp of a bad acid trip, or at a demented circus show, which seems appropriate in the case of “Mr. Kite!” These songs are worth listening to on repeat, even though I worried about my mental health the whole time.
The penultimate song, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)” features Foxygen and MGMT’s Ben Goldwasser. The structure of the song is reminiscent of Foxygen’s new album “…And Star Power” in that it deteriorates as the song draws to a close. The rock and roll mess turns into “A Day in the Life,” sung by Wayne Coyne, whose presence I’d nearly forgotten up to that point. Cyrus appears again, singing McCartney’s part of the song. It is easily another standout track on the album.
Not everything can be gold, however. “With a Little Help from My Fwends” lost me on two songs. First was one of my favorite Beatles tracks of all time, “Within You Without You.” The distracting singing of Birdflower takes away from one of George Harrison’s masterpieces. The second song is “Lovely Rita.” The intro to the song stunned me, and when Dennis Coyne’s begins to sing in the beginning, I got really excited. Then Tegan and Sara come in and kind of destroy the whole thing. While “Within You Without You” mostly irked me, I was actually disappointed with this one. I guess we can’t always get everything!
As a whole, The Flaming Lips’s new effort proves just as interesting as its “Dark Side of the Moon” cover. It’s intriguing to see all the band can do with songs that have become such an important part of music history.
Reach the reporter at wruof@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @willruof
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