With a Little Help from My Fwends

Purists may regard the project as a desecration, but the Flips could have pushed it even further with no complaints from this jury.

This is a scribble to go up on the fridge alongside other much-loved items, even if those items are photographs which remind you what real life looks like. Stick a magnet on it. It's done.

Ultimately it doesn't feel much like a proper Flaming Lips album, at least not as much as their take on Dark Side of the Moon, but like that album it's an intriguing glimpse of whatever strange journey they have planned next.

This is no halfhearted sideshow done on a drug prompted whim, but a serious if twisted and undeniably idiosyncratic re-make/re-model.

With this album, they show it’s okay to not take things like popular music and culture so damn seriously and just have fun with it or at it.

s. The result is a delightful tribute to The Beatles and a record that has made so many turn on, tune in and drop out.

Although die-hard Beatles fans might see the album as a bit blasphemous, the Flaming Lips' treatment of the classic work makes it clear the band have a great respect for the Fab Four's legacy and influence, making the album a wonderful distraction that provides fans with a window into the influences of one of rock's most enduring and joyously weird bands.

Coyne doesn't actually sing on the majority of these covers, but regardless, the album is decidedly refracted through a Flaming Lips light.

It's not a perfect album by any means, but it is a worthy cover of a nigh-on perfect album, capturing the joie de vivre of the original and dousing it in some serious lunacy for good measure. And that's no mean feat.

It's still, ultimately, a novelty rather than something that's likely to become part of your life. [No. 115, p.55]

Not everything works as well, but its entertaining enough and a portion of proceeds go to charity. [Dec 2014, p.76]

The Lips’ Fwends are so intent on tripping up the songs’ rhythmic momentum and weirding up the basic melodies with hammy vocals that they ultimately reinforce their sturdiness. They’re trashing all the furniture in the house, but not bulldozing any walls to open up new vantages.

We’re left with a decent covers album that will probably fare better than their Dark Side tribute.

It's largely horrible, but sometimes impressively so. [Dec 2014, p.94]

There's been a strong sense of diminishing returns. [Dec 2014, p.109]

Coyne's kaleidoscope eyes were too big for his own good this time.

Their approach is to drench the Beatles’ basic song structures in all manner of disorienting 21st-century effects. But the vaunted weirdness is undermined by ho-hum predictability.