Doing Dark Side of the Moon

The Flaming Lips and their mates in the bands Stardeath and the White Dwarfs (fronted by Wayne Coyne's nephew Dennis) have decided to put on a show in Grandma's barn. And they've chosen to recreate Pink Floyd's classic song cycle, Dark Side of the Moon. An album beloved of middle-aged gentlemen and stoners everywhere, it's almost too obvious a psychedelic touchstone for the fabulous furry freaks.
And the results are... interesting. First, the record has all the charm you'd expect from the Flaming Lips. It avoids note-perfect recreations and lush production, in favour of a stripped down, ropey, and vaguely lo-fi fuzz-fest. Furthermore, there are no ironic quotation marks. This isn't a pop art happening. It's more like the audio equivalent of the Mona Lisa as re-rendered by a sensitive but asocial outsider artist with nothing but a box of crayons. Indeed, you can almost feel freak tongues protruding between freak teeth with the effort it takes to follow those complex Pink Floyd chord sequences, time-signatures, and texture shifts. And as a result it is smile-inducing.
But like a precocious child, after a while it starts to grate on weary adult auditory canals. For example, while replacing Clare Torry's soulful wails on 'The Great Gig in the Sky' with a less tuneful and sonically-effected Peaches was eyebrow-raising the first time around, by the third listen it just sounded wrong. It made me want to root out the original... And I don’t even like the original. So in a way the three bands collected here have achieved something - they've made me feel defensive about an album I never thought I liked in the first place.