Sunday, 17 January 2010
deserves so much more than a shitty MP3 release...
Were you to pick a band that were to inherit the Pink Floyd mantle, you may not be too far away from choosing The Flaming Lips : epic live shows, extended and versatile space-rock jams morphed with frail, smart lyrics, and
It may then, be no surprise, that their next album – three short months after the experimental, jetset, and retro “Embryonic”, is a note-for-note rebuild of The Floyds “Dark Side Of The Moon”. You couldn't pick a bigger icon to grapple, for with “Dark Side” being the biggest selling album of all time, there is always someone, somewhere listening to it at any given second in human history. The Lips take on this cultural mountain undefeated, retaining their credibility with a worthy if unessential record. You wouldn't sit around arguing this record has to exist – but if a band were to do a song-for-song recreation of it, The Flaming Lips would be my premiere choice.
It could be a somewhat slavish and unoriginal, blow-by-blow copy of the original, so much so you could barely detect a difference bar the vocals, a dull and flat imitation. Or it could be that best of 'covers' ; a resetting of the original with faith and respect and a new interpretation – think Pet Shop Boys “Always On My Mind”, Johnny Cash's “Hurt.” Not Leona Bloody Lewis “Hallelujah”. (I'm told it was Alexandra Burke, I'm glad I got it wrong)
Alongside their-new-favourite-band Stardeath, and Henry Rollins – they have returned with a brilliant, audacious, and determindedly original slant on a great record that has become, against it's will, blunted into conformity and eaten by the mainstream. Whilst the song remains the same, everything else has changed. The approach is the same as if these were just the next bunch of songs the Flips wrote, and the songs shine through.
From the opening : Henry Rollins calmly reciting “I've been mad for fucking years” - to the last notes of a stellar brainmashed “Eclipse”, the Flips version is a new venture. Songs known the human psyche, and as familiar as the 1812 Overture, are new, different. And it's proof, as such, that a great album is not just about such songwriting, but also about the sound, the treatment, the approach given to the material. If you're expecting a record where you can predict every drum roll and guitar lick, give up now. As a fan of both bands though, “DSOTM” is an essential listen, even if just once, for fans of either.
The strength of “Dark Side” is, and always was, the timelessness of the themes within it ; song titles betray the core lyrical obsessions, Time, Money, Breathing, Death, Us And Them – the things that drive human beings. A pop psychologist would say that the album has become the most popular suite of music of all time because of this – that it resonates with us on a core level, reflects our drives, our hopes and fears, our obsessions – and does so in conjunction with songwriting that is commensurate with the best of the band's career. Every song was memorable, strong, and all flowed well together as a whole – in effect, one piece of music in ten parts. With songs this strong it would be difficult for it to suddenly dip in power and resonance.
So, where does it differ from The Biggest Selling Album Of All Time? The major differences are well, not many : “Breathe” is built on a mass of percussion and distant steel guitar – a far cry from the sparse original, counterpinned by Rollins brilliantly manic, monotone spoken word. The familair guitar is replaced by a biting bass and droning, otherworldly guitar duet : instead of Gilmour's delicate whine, here it resembles an angry 'Metal Machine Music'. “Us And Them” is a simple organ-and-vocal call-and-response, “The Great Gig In The Sky” sits on a heavily-distorted Peaches who approximates, not replicates, the original Clare Torry melody and creates an different way of sort of saying the same thing. “On The Run” - on record a tedious 3 minute demonstration of panning stereo effects and the patch pedal on an old Emulator – is reborn as half-brand-new-Flips-wig-out and the rest resembling the original guitar based jam that early versions of the song (then known as “The Travel Sequence”) were. Building “Time” on a litany of coughs, sighs, and hiccups is a genius move ; when the chords break in at 0:44-2:07 it sounds like hell itself has been opened, before collapsing to a simple strummed guitar and fragile vocal, before slipping back into “Breathe” at 4.00 – missing the long instrumental wigouts that made the original so beloved. Whilst almost every note in the same place it always was, it never sounded like this.
Sonically, this album is clearly a labour of love set in the same time and space as “Embryonic”, made of invention and with a sense of fun at the heart of it. And Steve Drozd is one of the finest producers of all time – these sounds, drawn from conventional instruments are clearly the voice of a unique musical personality.
As a treatment, this will definitely alienate a few of the more slavish Floyd fans who believe The Holy Canon should NOT be touched. They are zealots who miss the spirit of their beloved band – seeing how little respect the Floyd treated their own work in the seventies with a half-hour version of the 3m30s “Embryo” - it would be fair to say that this reimagining is both respectful and original : a remake that has validity and integrity.
NOTE
At the time of writing, this release is only available as a download from certain major retailers – the same retailers that will charge you 69p a song, yet pay the bands themselves a pisspoor fraction of this. Music is worth more than a bunch of encoded bits and bytes. I remember the days of taking the record home on the bus, desperate to hear the notes within, reading the sleevenotes and the lyrics, looking for hidden messages, wondering what a line like “Mr.Lenin Awaken The Boy / Mr Stalin Bisexual Epoch” might sound like, of the artistry of visual design, graphics, the image on the rotating label that would soon go onto that record deck, the feel of the print, and here, this record, the fine music within is reduced, shrunk, made nothing more than a 80 pixel x 80 pixel squashed square, the music itself compressed to a 192kbps m4a file, missing the invisible spectrum that still exists ; the thing you cannot see or hear that makes what you can see, hear and touch more effective, and monopolises fans of the band into a ghetto where you MUST buy this from one place, in one form, without even the permanence of owning it as an object, but owning it as merely an idea. All that you touch, and all that you see, is a bunch of DRM'ed, encoded, low quality music files. And great music deserves to be heard, and great art deserves space to breathe and be admired. Space is enormous – and iTunes are strangling music with this kind of crap. This album deserves better.Only registered users can write comments.
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