Review Summary: "What would you think if I sang out of tune—would you stand up and walk out on me?"
The Flaming Lips have yet again gathered their friends and musical acolytes together to create a psych-pop supergroup (albeit with some oddities in the lineup up, such as Tegan and Sara, and the one and only Miley Cyrus, twerk extraordinaire) to tackle what is considered by many to be one of the greatest albums of all-time, if not
the greatest. This time around, the Lips have covered The Beatles’
”Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, the third in a series of cover albums by the band. As with the other two albums, there’s an abundance of potential in this cover album. However, the potential in an album such as this is simply wasted on obnoxious sound effects, filters, and pointless cameos (Electric Wurms and Moby, anyone?). Not only is the promise in such a collaboration wasted, but the ideas that lie beneath it are just half-baked and barely developed – a troubling problem with recent Flaming Lips projects, with a decent few exceptions. This year has been eventful for the band, with an accompaniment album to Pink Floyd’s
”The Dark Side of the Moon” (an April Fools’ prank), an edit of the astounding
”7 Skies H3”, and the debut EP by side-project, Electric Wurms, entitled
”Musik, Die Schwer Zu Twerk” - in English, it’s loosely translated as “Music that is hard to twerk to”. Here, while the cover suggests it’s a Flaming Lips album, the final product is barely such a thing. There’s just not enough of them on here, leaving the listener wanting more of them and less of the dozen bands and artists featured on this album.
Entitled
”With A Little Help From My Fwends”, this is a smorgasbord of noise, psychedelics, and most of all, typical Flaming Lips nonsense. And part of that is the saving grace of this particular album, for many of the guest artists on
”Fwends” sound incredibly unenthusiastic (most notably, Cyrus on her two appearances). Said lack of vigor drags down this album, and bogs down the quality of the product. Many of the tracks on here contain some legitimately interesting ideas within the stagnant musicianship, leaving a thought of what could’ve been had this album been more consistent, more organized.
But I digress.
”With A Little Help From My Fwends” does actually do a decent job of doing the original Sgt. Peppers album justice, despite all of its troubling flaws. The cover of
”When I’m Sixty-Four”, handled by the Lips, Def Rain, and Pitchwafuzz, takes the original version and transforms it into a drum machine driven piece laden with vocoder filtered-vocals - a sharp contrast from the kitschy music hall original. Other tracks such as
”She’s Leaving Home” (featuring Phantogram and Spaceface) and
”Within You Without You” (featuring Birdflower and Morgan Delt) add to their respective originals, but just don’t exactly live up to the quality of them as well.
Overall, the final result of this particular album is varied, but plagued with many obnoxious cameos that definitely weren't an necessity. Devoid of passion and sincerity, the music at points seemed quite robotic and cold - a very unlikely concept for artists such as The Flaming Lips.
”With A Little Help From My Fwends” deserves respect however, as it attempted to cover such an album that really didn’t need covered. It took a challenge by gathering several musicians to add their ideas to the original songs done half a century before. Despite all its flaws, The Flaming Lips and friends definitely deserve respect. Lastly, despite the attempt at doing a cover album, the lack of original ideas and half-hearted covers brought the chances of this succeeding to an absolute death knell. Fortunately, there are some relatively decent covers on
”Fwends”, so it’s somewhat worth checking out.
