Fresh off their Gasparilla Music Festival performance, the Flaming Lips have released a companion album to Pink Floyd's seminal LP Dark Side of the Moon. Entitled Flaming Side of the Moon, the album (naturally) plays in conjunction with the Wizard of Oz too, so you can freak out all over again as, through a haze of weed smoke, gleefully baked, you point at the munchkins marching in exact time to the tempo of "Money."
This isn't the Lips first forray into the Dark Side either. In 2010, they released a full-on cover of the album with a mouthful of a title: The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins and Peaches Doing The Dark Side of the Moon.
I gave Flaming Side of the Moon a spin alongside the original last night and the results were...tedious. Aside from a few moments like the even-creepier intro to "Time," the companion album provides little more than a few grating drones and subtle drum hits that seem to either hide far behind the original mix or spill out and muddle everything up. Attempting to slap your mark on one of the modern era's most audibly rich rock is a pretty ballsy move in itself, but the Flaming Lips have proven themselves masters of fuck-all weirdness just for the sake of weird over the past few years.
Whether they're releasing four songs on a USB drive encased in a life-sized gummy skull, using their own blood in the pressing of a limited-edition vinyl, or working a cover of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" with Miley Cyrus, it seems like the Lips exist these days for the sole purpose of fanning out their figurative tail feathers and going "Hah, made you look!" It's probably fun for them, but does anyone really get much more than a cursory chuckle out of all these stunts? Who knows.
Listen to a user-created sync of both albums below:
