Flaming Lips and White Dwarves Take on Pink Floyd

At first I was nervous about this version of Dark Side of the Moon. I heard a bit, about twenty seconds, of "Money" on the iTunes store and I was thinking "NO!NO!NO! This is ALL wrong!" but when I listened to the album from beginning to end I was pretty satisfied. The songs all contain enough Lips and enough Floyd to attract fans of either band even if fans of one are not necessarily fans of the other.

However, I was a little skeptical of the Henry Rollins vocals at first. I love Black Flag as much as the next guy but I was worried that including Rollins might just be a dumb gimmick to attract people who would otherwise be uninterested in the album. I was wrong. Rollins' vocals fit unusually well and give the recording a modern sounding edge that helps define the album as a work of its own rather than just a giant Pink Floyd cover. Rollins' voice coupled with the campy but cool falsetto background vocals gave the entire album a distinctly Flaming Lips feel.

Gone are the solos from "Money" and "Time" that defined their original recordings. Instead of Gilmour's masterful guitar playing the spaces are filled with less stimulating but equally appropriate ambience or simple melody. But at the same time, for songs like "Any Colour you like" (my favorite song on the original album) the However It's really better that the Lips didn't feel the need to emulate each guitar solo on EVERY song because I think it allowed them to make this album an interpretation of Pink Floyd rather than just a flat, boring, straight cover. Coyne's nephew's band Star Death and White Dwarves added some different sounding vocals to a few songs but the band is similar enough to the Lips that their playing is not jarring when heard alongside. The resulting sound is a more relaxed and more somber version of Dark Side that relies more on ambiance than straight composition.

The album definitely had the potential to devolve into a super-pretentious, long, drawn-out, version of Dark Side but ultimately, the sound is good, there is lots of originality but at the same time, there's a lot of fidelity to the original recording.

Space Truckin'

I love the flaming lips but my first reaction to hearing about Wayne Coyne's nephew fronting a band with the Lips as a major influence was: "great, we're in for a mediocre, amateur ish version of the flaming lips". This is because I'm such an unapologetic, headstrong, music snob but despite my stubborness I was impressed by their first full album; The Birth. The music, while reminiscent of the flaming lips, was certainly able to stand on it's own. Like the flaming lips, Stardeath has a sound heavily influenced by space-rock ; the 70s genre of rock characterized by synthesizers, sci-fi lyrics, and rich dimension-filled production (examples include Pink Floyd and Hawkwind). Bands like Stardeath and the Lips demonstrate a sort of reimagining of space-rock which is just a bit poppier and more accessible to the average listener without making it as boring as most pop music tends to be lately. The album contains a good variety of material from the funky "Those who are from the sun return to the sun" to the catchy "Can't get away" to the melancholy "Country Ballad". This band has such wide appeal to so many different listeners.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]