The UFO lands on the Dark Side of the Moon

I emailed my editor at Soundproof Magazine Cody the other day to see if he had any connections to the Flaming Lips. A part of me imagined it would be as easy as that, just sending an email or two. "I actually don't have a contact for the Flaming Lips. Sorry I can't be of help."

Oh.

And there's no contact information on their myspace or websites other than chat forums and comments sections. Whooo do I talk to?

Eventually I gave up looking for an email address and began reading about how other fans made it on stage at a Lips performance. Many said it wasn't all that easy. You had to get their super early, possibly help the stage crew blow up all the balloons. If you were lucky and didn't pass out you, and you found the guy they call the "Animal Wrangler", the one stage crew member who's in charge of picking dancers before the performance, you could get on stage. I could get on stage.

As for the 'Lips, their latest project, released only two months after the eccentric and bizarre Embryonic in October 2009, is an ambitious collaborative cover album with Stardeath and White Dwarfs, Peaches and former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins. Which album did they choose to cover? Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon. Ohh, baby.

They don't mess around much with the tracklist or structure, but if you're expecting it to sound even remotely like the original, well, you must not know the Flaming Lips very well.

They tear apart 'Breathe's tranquil madness with low-fi guitar scrawl and 'On The Run' is turned into a death-disco type dance beat. While the first half is at times pretty parodic, and 'Money' is downright silly (with a plunky, ambling bassline and talkbox robot vocals), 'Us and Them', 'Brain Damage' and 'Eclipse' close the record in hommage to the original, not mockery. My favourite cover on the album is the always colourful 'Any Colour You Like,' which the boys turn into a low-fi, Lips-style funk tune; in my opinion, it's the best example of paying tribute without messing around too much with the original. And I love the original.

Notably, Peaches did do a hell of a job singing that hell of a solo on 'Great Gig in the Sky'. However, I doubt it could melt faces like Clare Torry's infamous vocal contortions on the original Dark Side.

Alright, yeah I'm a bit of a critic. But they chose Dark Side of the Moon, for crying out loud. They knew what they were getting themselves into. And It's hardly about the actual covers anyway. It's more about the effort, the fact that they, one of today's most experimental and psychedelic groups still performing, covered Floyd, who easily held the same title in their day. What's more, Pink Floyd performances have always been known as not only a show but a spectacle, even from their first performances at San Francisco's Fillmore East when they mixed chemicals on a slide projector to cloud themselves in crazy shifting colours throughout their set. To have the 'Lips perform this album, marrying innovation in experimentalism and psychedelia from one generation to the next, is ambitious, exciting and pretty much meant to be.

So now you know why I want to be a part of whatever happens on July 10 when they take the stage at Bluesfest. Great Gig in the Sky, indeed.

Your devout Floydian,
V. Rocky Racoon

Balloon photo courtesy of brdwatchr1