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.