Album Details

• Artist: The Flaming Lips
• Album: Dark Side Of The Moon
• Label: Reprise
• Year of Release: 2009
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: MusicCritic on 2011-03-01

The Flaming Lips covered Dark Side of the Moon. If that’s not enough for you to check out the specifically titled The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins and Peaches Doing The Dark Side of the Moon – it’s not that bad.

The Flaming Lips are one of the more psychedelic mainstream bands of their era, so it’s only fitting that they cover the signature album of one of the more psychedelic bands of the ’60s and ’70s. The difference in eras is the sheer number of electronic toys at the Lips disposal, and they put them to use in both successful and not so successful ways, examples of the former being the creepy, distorted vocals from Peaches on ‘The Great Gig in the Sky,’ and the not-so good being the drum machines instead of the coin drops on ‘Money.’

Amazingly, on their Dark Side of the Moon the Lips took a classic album and put their stamp on it. It probably won’t please Pink Floyd purists, but there’s enough intact here to recognize the moody and expansive original, while getting a feel for the weird joyfulness of the Lips themselves. It doesn’t all work. The pacing is off on ‘Money’ and it just isn’t as good as the original – for some reason I don’t think the robot vocals are as upset about the bindings of capitalism as David Gilmour was. But ‘Us and Them’ has the Lips hitting the write notes, both honouring a classic tune and building their own strange melodic sense into it.

It’s the Flaming Lips covering a classic album. There was a lot of potential for a misstep here, but the band avoids embarrassing themselves on classic material and adds a few of their own craters to the Dark Side of the Moon.

Jon Roe

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