By 1967, the Beatles were done with touring and they were solely a recording band working in the studio to create imaginative masterpieces that would impact us more deeply than any live concert would. The crown jewel of the music created during this period, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” has resurfaced in a collaborative effort headed by today’s premiere psych-rock band The Flaming Lips.
Dubbed “With a Little Help From My Fwends,” The Flaming Lips' rendering adds color to an already fantastical album. A spectacular, tension-building 30-second introduction to it all lets you know that it's an ambitious endeavor from the start.
Compared to the original, the version is spacier. The interpretations are noisier on what had been soft tracks for the Beatles. “With a Little Help From My Fwends” flows between relaxed verse and angry, distorted exclamations.
The highlight of the album is Miley Cyrus singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Cyrus sings with a raspy voice that departs from her old music and makes the transition from pop to something much more psychedelic just as the Beatles did in the late 1960s. Alt-J must have been privy to her changing image when they sampled her on “Hunger of the Pine” earlier this year, and this Flaming Lips project is doing everything it can to help her continue that transformation from Disney child star to hippie queen. With a tone that is simultaneously somber and dissociative, Cyrus find the perfect way to float mellifluously over a swarm of colorful music. She is the star “fwend” of the album.
The album goes back and forth between bright, sunny pop and heavy, fuzz-driven psychedelia. The cover of “Getting Better” provides a mellow relief after “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” exhausts the power bill.
The sudden changes in tempo in the album are captivating. This project pushes the bounds of who belongs in psych-rock. Phantogram is neither the trippiest, nor the headiest of bands, but their own distinct sound works well in the Flaming Lips homage. “With a Little Help From My Fwends” is remarkable in that it brings out the most hallucinatory sounds of each and every one of these collaborators.
There is a slight lull in the middle of the album, where it becomes more of an expo of today’s psych artists and what sounds can be made in the recording studio. However, the album picks up its cheer with “Good Morning Good Morning,” where the Flaming Lips’ sunny embellishments of the Beatles’ work resurface.
The reprisal of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” featuring Foxygen is a high point. Foxygen, one of the best time-travelers in music today, recaptures the San Francisco Sound and the music of the Summer of Love. Having just released a 24-track album earlier this month, Foxygen combines a lazy, feel-good sound with unreal productivity. Their contribution to the album demonstrates how far the music has come, as well as how much it's stayed the same.
The last track, the sacred “A Day in the Life,” sounds more like its original than any of the other songs. Cyrus reemerges on this song, trading verses with Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne. The trade-off between tension and release, in which quiet succeeds cacophony again and again, emulates the Beatles almost identically. Most of the renditions on the album add a new layer or two, but the re-imagining is certainly a tribute. As such, it lets the album do its work. The artists, each talented and bizarre, are just the voices passing along the tradition of infusing imaginative color into pop music.
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