The Flaming Lips latest album, With a Little Help From My Fwends, is a track-by-track cover of the Beatles’ beloved Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, is weird. However, anyone who has been following the band at some point during its illustrious career has come to expect this of them. The question that should be asked is “how weird and what type of weird is it?” Is it the structured and joyous weird present in The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, or is it the cacophonous and depressing weird that has manifested itself in the band’s more recent albums, The Terror and Embryonic. The answer is not so black and white, as this album, a heartfelt homage to one of the greatest and most influential rock albums of all time, seems to mix both approaches.
On one end, it seems as if the band has coaxed its previous joy out of its hiding place in order to match the tone of the original Beatles album. On the other hand, the distortive, trippy musical style the Lips employed in their latest works is still very much present. As a result, the end approach is very mixed in terms of quality. One one end, it is very clear that the Flaming Lips are attempting to match the emotional core of the Beatles album in all its spontaneity and enthusiasm, however the Flaming Lips and their various guests anti-melodic approach to the album almost feels like a betrayal to the calibrated, always measured approach of the Beatles.
While there are some highlights such as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” featuring Miley Cyrus and Moby, “She’s Leaving Home,” featuring Phantogram, Julianna Barwick and Spaceface, and finally “A Day in the Life,” again featuring Miley Cyrus along with New Fumes, these songs tend to be the ones that least abandoned the melodic, pocketed approach of the Beatles in favor of distorted, arrhythmic form of the recent Flaming Lips. Following this, there are songs such as “With a Little Help From my Friends,” “Getting Better” and “When I’m Sixty-Four,” which are hardly even recognizable from the originals and feel caught between two identities.
While one is a fan of the recent Flaming Lips approach is open to subjectivity, and those that do enjoy it are bound to get enjoyment out of this album. However, those that are fans of either the original Beatles, or the Flaming Lips, particularly their earlier work, are bound to be disappointed by this album’s genuine but ultimately botched attempt to pay homage to a very relevant classic.
Rating: C-
