Grade: 65/100
The Flaming Lips, a psychedelic rock group founded in the ’80s, recently released their 14th album, “With a Little Help From My Fwends.” The album’s proceeds go toward The Bella Foundation, a charity lending assistance to elderly, ill or impoverished pet owners in Oklahoma City (The Flaming Lips’ hometown) who can’t afford veterinary care. In releasing the album, the band has proven it can make “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” stranger and more psychedelic than ever.
The trippy Beatles tribute features all 13 original tracks of the original album. As the new album name would imply, The Flaming Lips enlisted the help of several “friends” to record the songs with them, including musicians like Miley Cyrus, Moby and the band My Morning Jacket.
In terms of quality, the album takes “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and makes it hard to listen to, with dragging vocals and unnecessary echoes. The changes in tempo and quality totally morph the tone of the songs until they seem to send completely different messages.
But while all of the songs sound nothing like their original recordings, they start sounding similar to each other with the same delivery and trippy sound effects.
Granted, in a tribute cover album, the artist should take artistic license and avoid replicating the original sound. But the lyrics and general message are still the same and should play a prominent role in how the artist interprets a song. In “With a Little Help From My Fwends,” it sounds as if The Flaming Lips arbitrarily assigned sound effects throughout the album without thinking about how they can interfere with the songs’ meaning.
Their recording of “She’s Leaving Home,” for example, has no semblance of a song about a girl running away. Instead it has an almost lighthearted beat accompanied by monotonous vocals. In a song involving the perspective of a runaway’s parents, singing without a trace of emotion makes little sense. The song doesn’t have to come across as a melodrama, but the singers should at least pretend they know what they’re singing about.
Fortunately, not all of the tracks sound as if the singers are reading the lyrics as they go. The songs in which Miley Cyrus contributes her voice — “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds” and “A Day In the Life” — are significantly better than the others. The Flaming Lips stuck closer with the original sound and pacing. While still considerably loosely connected with the original tracks, they have similar delivery with Cyrus’s help.
Otherwise, “With a Little Help From My Fwends” sounds as if there was no real goal or message with it, and that The Flaming Lips randomly decided to record a Beatles cover album in which they make every song sound as similar as possible.