The Flaming lips. Photo / Supplied
Rating: * * *
Verdict: Floyd covers album has its ups (up ..up ... ) and downs (down ... down ... ).
So no points for originality then. Even covering Pink Floyd's 45 million-selling 1973 behemoth concept album track by track has been done before - this one follows a bluegrass Dark Side of the Moonshine, a reggae Dub Side of the Moon, a string quartet take, a vocal-only and various other
recorded and live tributes.
But this one manages to navigate a fine line between reverence and artful vandalism, springing from the band - America's greatest psychedelic poprock institution - asking its fans to vote on which Floyd album they should cover, playing it live on New Year's Eve in their hometown, Oklahoma City.
On this digital-only release, they had some help, its full title being The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins and Peaches Doing the Dark Side of the Moon.
Rollins takes care of the spoken segues while Peaches is on freeform wailing duties on The Great Gig in the Sky, her vocals adding the words "air raid" to the siren song that was the original.
Likewise, the rest of this album is about stripping out the finesse of Floyd's audio landmark and seeing the songs thrive or wither under the Lips' fuzz-freaked approach.
Which means Money long overstays its welcome with its slow squelchy electropop with vocoder vocals. But the noisy attacks on the likes of Breathe and Eclipse and the fragile take on Us and Them make this sound like it could have been a Flaming Lips album in a former life and quite a good one.
