Attention psychonauts! We interrupt your lysergic day trip across the fifth dimension to announce that the musical programme has been changed. Instead of The Beatles’ 1967 LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—which depending on your point of view is either thee ultimate psychedelic masterpiece or a middling work chiefly distinguished by its revolutionary recording techniques, which in effect turned the studio into a de facto fifth Beatle—you’ll be hearing 2014’s With a Little Help from My Fwends, The Flaming Lips’ track-by-track re-imagining of The Beatles LP. As a result, you can expect significant turbulence, fuzz, distortion, dissonance, noise, and oh yeah, Miley Cyrus, along with numerous other fwends of the band. In short, fasten your seat belts because there are interstellar speed bumps ahead, and hallucinations in your rear view mirror will be closer than they appear.
You have to admire the Flaming Lips’ pluck. Wayne Coyne and the boys might have thrown us a dayglo marshmallow along the lines of 1999’s easy-on-the-ears The Soft Bulletin. Instead they came through with a nerve-jarring and challenging aural experience that harkens back to their Oklahoma days of unconscious screaming. The LP is enormous fun, but not for the faint of ear, and I have no doubt there are Beatles fans who find it nothing short of an act of desecration. The Flaming Lips—and their bwesties—gleefully fold, spindle and mutilate The Beatles’ classic, but their version has moments galore of beauty and wonder—they’re simply buried in a lot of white noise. Can cacophony be lovely? With a Little Help from My Fwends answers the question in the affirmative.
With a Little Help from My Fwends is a better adaptation than The Flaming Lips’ 2009 reworking of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which is a mite surprising given that the Lips’ views on existence have always been surprisingly… dark. Death has always been a preoccupation—from their early days through “Do You Realize” on 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and songs like “Evil Will Prevail,” “Charles Manson Blues,” and “Five Stop Mother Superior Rain” (with its lines “My hands are in the air/And that’s where they always are/You’re fucked if you do, and you’re fucked if you don’t/Five stop mother superior rain”) don’t exactly reflect the sunny surrealism of their live shows.
The opening title track features My Morning Jacket, Fever the Ghost, and J. Mascis, and opens with some synthesized noise before the vocals come in all cartoon-like and processed before you get some relatively straight-up vocals on the chorus. Hiss predominates, and to add to the clamor factor you get a typically unhinged guitar solo by Mr. Dinosaur Jr. Billy Shears would love it. “With a Little Help from My Friends” opens chaotically and features Black Pus (aka drummer and vocalist Brian Chippendale of Lightning Bolt) and indie rock band Autumn Defense. Wayne Coyne (who doesn’t do much singing on the album) plays Ringo but doesn’t sing at all out of key, leaving that to the shriekers and screamers providing accompaniment. And when the drums come crashing in it ain’t pretty. A bad trip for some, perhaps, but fans of the Lips’ earlier work are guaranteed to make it their new best friend.
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is also drenched in fuzz and random noise, but Miley Cyrus’ vocals are lovely—both unadorned and processed. Meanwhile Moby sings “gone, gone, gone, gone, etc.” until the chorus crashes spectacularly down on your ears like a shattered looking glass sky, and it comes as no surprise when Cyrus says laughingly at the end, “Doesn’t that make you nervous?” Rapper Chuck Inglish—who’s backed by Philly rockers Dr. Dog—approaches “Getting Better” in a comfortably conversational tone, and it works—makes you want to climb into a bean bag chair and cuddle with the nearest hallucination. It opens with a big pulsating throb that gives way a bouncing booming bass, but it won’t have you reaching for the benzos, in part because the vocalists behind Inglish aren’t shrieking. In short, all involved play nice.
“Fixing a Hole” features Electric Würms, a one-off project by The Flaming Lips’ Steven Drozd and Wayne Coyne and Nashville, TN band Linear Downfall. Some straight-up acoustic guitar and suitably dreamy vocals make “Fixing a Hole” the song on With a Little Help from My Fwends that most closely approximates the original, and it disappoints as a result. You get no strings on “She’s Leaving Home,” just a Casio MIDI beat. Along for the ride is Julianna Barwick of dream pop band Phantogram, who gets an assist from Nashville’s Spaceface, whose members include former Flaming Lip Jake Ingalls and comes through with some suitably dreamy vocals that are almost too lovely for the song’s subject matter. That said, you would have to be a real blue meanie to make a big deal out of it. No chaotic din on this one, just a lovely reading of a lovely song with lots of vocal echo, echo, echo, echo. The twisted vocals of Maynard James Keenan (Tool, A Perfect Circle and Puscifier) lends “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” a properly carnival-like atmosphere, while behind him you get a bit of everything—a constantly varying throb, lots of alternately burbling and chittering synthesizer, and some oceanic wash and synthesized harps. Some lunatic laughter too. This is one helter skelter ride you won’t want to miss.
“Within You Without You” features an appropriately Indian drone and the vocals of New York electro singer Birdflower and is the most overtly psychedelic song on the album. But despite its Eastern influences there isn’t a sitar in sight, just lots of reined-in noise, that is until the song slips its reins at the close. Ashley Leer of post-punk band Def Rain—it’s wonderful how many female vocalists there are on the album—sounds anything but bubbly on Paul McCartney’s bubbly confection “When I’m Sixty-Four,” and the song itself hardly bounces along either—it’s all very matter of fact. The electronic static and hiss don’t warm the song up much either—that’s left entirely to the heavily distorted backing vocals and the oompah and church bells that punctuate the song. In short it’s a surprisingly somber take on one of Sir Paul’s trademark lightweight ditties.
“Lovely Rita” opens on a big, throbbing electronic note, with lots of snap, crackle and pop thrown in to add breakfast crunch. Then in come Tegan & Sara, singing the lyrics in an idiosyncratic rush and playing very fast and loose with the melody. It’s all very charming, and is followed by a long electronic psychedelic instrumental that features whooshes, neato sound effects (synthesized monkeys anyone?), panting, and some voices doing weird things. It’s a triumph, and it’s followed by the equally excellent “Good Morning Good Morning,” on which Grace Potter and what sounds like a cast of thousands deliver a streamlined vocal performance that develops some serious fractures as the song goes on. At one point you get what sounds like a combination of The Beach Boys and some fifties doo wop group, and it’s time meld groovy. As for the “good morning good morning,” its sung in a real late-for-work rush.
The “Reprise” of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is a real joy, and perhaps the most exciting ride on With a Little Help from My Fwends. It’s electronic hard rock and the band really pushes the melody along, throwing in some fuzzed out vocals for freak appeal, And then the song shifts into what sounds like an extended riff on an imaginary Creedence Clearwater Revival song, which comes complete with lots of percolating percussion, one wigged-out organ, and a plethora of electronic noises. This is pure inner space rock ’n’ roll, and it grooves on and on, the intensity increasing all the while until it reaches a chaotic peak and comes to a faltering, radio hiss end.
And it’s followed by the original’s masterstroke, John Lennon’s “A Day in the Life,” which Coyne sings to the accompaniment of piano. He doesn’t fuck with it—he sounds every bit as serious as Lennon—and takes you to the “I’d love to turn you on” when, after a long, noisy stretch you get some pulsating electronica, wacky voices, and finally the return of Miley Cyrus, who handles the spoken-word “Woke up, got out of bed” part of the song in a sleepy voice. Then comes the long “Ah-ah-ah-ah,” after which Coyne returns to sing about how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. Which takes us to the legendary take-out, which is mostly space noise and hiss and is followed by Cyrus saying, well, something.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is arguably the most famous and influential—for good or ill—album in rock history. It’s practically a part of our race’s collective unconscious, and it’s almost as much a historical “before and after” line of demarcation as The Beatles themselves. So it was nice of the Flaming Lips and their confederates to give it a long soak in strong LSD and offer us the exploding electronic Syd Barrett version. Listen to it, and you’ll likely find yourself compiling a list of other classics deserving of the Flaming Lips Treatment. Pet Sounds would be the obvious choice. I think they could do great things with Pet Sounds. They could call it Wet Zounds. I’m going to shoot them an e-mail!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
