Album Review: The Flaming Lips - With A Little Help From My Fwends

Set to polarise listeners, The Flaming Lips and a horde of their “fwends” have re-recorded the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.

A lot of listeners, presumably baby boomers, will undoubtedly complain that Wayne Coyne and company didn’t need to go about the wholesale destruction of this iconic album but didn’t they already say that when the Lips released their version of Dark Side Of The Moon? After the brutality of The Terror and this year’s edit of the psychedelic jam 7 Skies H3, this album finds the Lips in an altogether more playful mood as they put a psychedelic bomb under the Beatles’ classics. They take great delight in blowing it to pieces and rather experimentally putting it back together again. Erykah Badu may not be a fwend of the Lips anymore but My Morning Jacket, J Mascis, Tegan & Sara, Foxygen and Phantogram among others ensure that the irreverent results are truly kaleidoscopic. Surprisingly the mix is synth-heavy and while much of the album has a funky ‘switched on’ vibe, many of the hooks associated with these songs remain. It’s hard not to be weirded out to find Miley Cyrus on a Lips album. She sounds subdued on Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and devastatingly flat on A Day In The Life. In contrast, the always classy Julianna Barwick’s experimental Casiotone approach to She’s Leaving Home proves a highlight.

Altogether a landmark of psychedelic rock brought under the influence of different hallucinogens.