ALBUM REVIEW: The Flaming Lips And Stardeath And White Dwarfs With Henry Rollins And Peaches Doing Dark Side Of The Moon

Artist: Stardeath & White Dwarfs, The Flaming Lips
Album: The Flaming Lips And Stardeath And White Dwarfs With Henry Rollins And Peaches Doing Dark Side Of The Moon
Label: Warner Bros
Rating: 3/10

My assignment was to review the new full-album cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ by The Flaming Lips and protégés Stardeath & White Dwarfs. I suppose I’ve been asked to do so for one of many reasons – I’ve done time in a Floyd cover band; I’m a huge fan of the band, particularly their material from 1968-1972; and, debatably, I’m the Zeitgeisty Report’s resident Pink Floyd Expert© – for what that’s worth.

Well, I’ve listened. And the first question that comes to mind is ‘why?’ Also the second question. Then the question repeats over and over and over again. I can’t think of an instance when something offered less justification for its own existence. It completely resists any attempt to dig beneath the surface sonic layer, deflecting deeper analysis off of the hard, plastic core underneath.

This type of thing can actually be done well. Never minding excellent covers albums by Cat Power or any of Johnny Cash’s ‘American Recordings,’ even full tribute albums can be genuinely interesting, revelatory, or at the very least, fun. The Black Crowes touring the Zeppelin catalogue with Jimmy Page was a genuine revelation. Chris Robinson’s more relaxed vocals – an improvement over Robert Plant, in some instances – and the band’s clear enthusiasm for the material lent weight to the argument that Zeppelin should be seen as a genuine part of the blues continuum, something Zeppelin themselves had a hard time doing. At the very least, the project gave us a truly great live Zeppelin album, which Zeppelin never did during their career.

The best covers or tributes can shed new light on the original. But this?

Again, why?

It’s not all a waste. There are a few bright spots of genuine wit, here. The new take on the intro to ‘Time’ is pretty neat, with Floyd’s clanging and ticking clocks giving way to panicked rhythmic breathing and digital alarm buzz. In fact, the entire version of ‘Time’ is the bright spot on the album. The verse takes on a strange Morricone vibe, with the singer somehow sounding on open prairie, looking skyward and delivering his lines with a distracted quality that reflects the meaning of the lyrics perfectly. They also truncate the song, leaping abruptly into the ‘Breathe’ reprise, another nice furtherance of lyricist Roger Waters’ themes.

The Pink Floyd of the ‘Dark Side’ era was a band that really knew how to make the instruments and electronics at their disposal deliver beautiful textures. Any Radiohead fan who thinks Floyd isn’t the premiere electronic experimental band should be strapped to a chair and forced to watch ‘Live at Pompeii.’ Following suit, here and there throughout the Lips’ tribute are little sonic touches that are within the same spirit as Floyd but still different enough to generate interest, like the other progressive rock references peppered throughout. There’s more than a hint of the quieter Robert Fripp to the guitar here, with ‘Great Gig in the Sky’ sounding like an outtake from King Crimson’s ‘Islands’ and ‘Us and Them’ sounding like the mournful ‘Book of Saturday’ from ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic.’ I also like the Massive Attack-sounding synths that flow in an out of the mix on ‘Money’ and elsewhere. The bass has a Chris Squire overdrive/compression vibe. Etc.

Other nice touches: All of the original interview voices from the original record are reproduced here by Henry Rollins (the individual listener’s appreciation of this will depend entirely on their tolerance for Henry Rollins, as he’s at his Henry Rollinsiest, here). The Casiotone drums on ‘Money’ also stick out, although what purpose they serve beyond some kind of stoner joke is elusive. And the ballad ‘Brain Damage’ here has a soft, meditative quality that’s refreshing, with an interesting combination of pounding toms and cymbal wash in last chorus.

Unfortunately, the positive bits are outweighed by the negatives. Missed opportunities abound. The take on ‘Us and Them’ is not just disappointing but hugely dull. Floyd’s original was built upon Richard Wright’s ability to make a Hammond Organ croon and soothe like no-one else, . The version here retains the idea of the organ-based chord change but then misses the point by using the Cheesemaster 2000, forfeiting all of the atmosphere of the original but gaining nothing in return. It’s a vague song, lyrically, but it touches mostly on the human capacity violence – suppressed, sudden, realized and ritualized. If you’re not going to capitalize on the contemplative qualities of composer Wright’s original vision, why not bring some of the aggression in the lyrics out in the music?

This lack of imagination drags huge portions of the project down. The wordless wail on the original ‘Great Gig in the Sky’ – so ripe for some kind of wild takeoff – is here reproduced note-for-note by Peaches (the singer, not the fruit). Areas where the band just waffles away at the same chords and tempo for minutes on end – actually a problem with the original album – are compounded here by the Lips/Stardeath locking into a bland groove (borrowed from Floyd’s earlier ‘Echoes’), played with zero dynamics but sounding as if it’s supposed to be really rocking triumphantly. Given the reprise-heavy structure of the original album, the Lips end up falling back to this totally uninspired groove again and again, with diminishing returns, and clearly lacking Floyd’s ability to find interesting new colorations. By the fourth reprise on the instrumental ‘Any Colour You Like,’ even the band sounds bored with themselves, literally just playing the groove for about eight bars before moving into the guitar breakdown.

As a side note, I’m not sure what they were thinking tackling a Floyd cover album without a decent and creative keyboard player on hand. Considering that ‘Any Colour You Like’ on the original record has literally no reason to exist without Rick Wright’s lovely synth runs, the synthless version here really throws the pointlessness of the project into sharp relief.

The ‘why bother’ feeling reaches its nadir with their use of pedal and vocal effects. The vocals throughout the album are fairly dull – although the dude does manage a fairly convincing Gilmour imitation on ‘Us and Them’ – but the layered whisper/vocorder effects on ‘Money’ not only bring nothing new to the song but arrive late enough to the pitch-correction overdrive party that they sound like Auto-Tune the News. And does anyone else hate the envelope filter as much as I do? The envelope filter just seems like the ultimate statement of a guitar player just giving up, and it’s laid all over the second half of the record – doubling the ‘Money’ riff and clogging up ‘Any Colour…’ But it scrapes bottom on album-closer ‘Eclipse.’ They win the double on ‘Eclipse’ by not only overdoing the envelope filter – turning it on and leaving it on – but also finding its single-most irritating usage by coupling the effect with a scratch-rhythm guitar.

It’s in the use of the envelope filter, in fact, that this project finally showed its hand. The envelope filter is the sound of Stoned America, thanks to Phish. And it sounds like the whole thing is pretty much the product of one stoned weekend, the boys – cousins, actually – from the Lips and Stardeath just hanging out, lighting up and jamming. But they do a disservice to the grand tradition of stoner music, here. Hell, they do a disservice to stoners. The original ‘Dark Side’ may be a famous stoner record, but the original music wasn’t made that way and it’s not helped at all if it’s played that way.

Partly, it’s an issue of American musicians’ ability to really ‘get’ the singularly British progressive rock (quick: name one really valid American prog band). Partly, it’s the inability of the collected members of Flaming Lips and Stardeath & White Dwarfs to display enough real understanding of the original record to bring much new to the table. But the big issue is that just jamming out ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ with your musician buddies is the definition of inessential. Every musician I know can fake their way through most of the album. It’s fun to jam because the songs are simple but solid, the lyrics are catchy and the arrangements are easy to reproduce with no advance preparation. But it’s also boring as hell to listen to these basement jams, and the fame of the musicians involved doesn’t change the fact that it remains so.

I don’t make blanket criticisms in a public forum lightly. I appreciate the effort that goes in to any work of art and I come from a training in critical thinking that believes in finding the value in practically anything. As a result, many people say I like a whole lot of crap. So take this next bit very seriously: This is one lazy fucking piece of stoner jam rock. The only excuse for its existence would be if all the proceeds were donated to charity (they’re not). In the shadowy ghetto of Pink Floyd tribute albums, this one has distinguished itself by not merely being the least essential, but also lowering the bar of invention so far that even the bluegrass version of ‘The Wall’ comes off seeming like an indispensable masterwork of thoughtful recontexualization in comparison. Congratulations, Lips and Stardeath! You’ve dug yourselves to the bottom of the pile.

For what it’s worth: Henry Rollins, you are forgiven.
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Review by Dave Kopperman