The Flaming Lips’ Dark Side of the Moon
330 wordsI have downloaded an album that excites me enough to blog for the first time in ages.
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was released in 1973, the same year I was born. It certainly wasn’t my parents’ kind of music, so I wasn’t exposed to it.
When I started paying attention to music, it was pop; Smash Hits fare; and Smash Hits certainly didn’t want anything to do with a bunch of boring old middle class hippies from 10 years ago.
Then later on, as I drifted into whatever John Peel told me to like at the time, it was either hip hop, electronica or punk-derived indie that I listened to. All of these were in stark opposition to what Pink Floyd stood for in my mind.
So I listen to the original Dark Side of the Moon with hostility. I’m a bit mellower about it nowadays, but I still balk at the tempo, the “soulful” solos, the gospel backing vocals, the saxophones… Perhaps these were OK in 1973, but ever since they’ve been a grating cliché.
But! It has some great songs on it, and I know that because of the Easy Star All Stars’ magnificent cover version of the entire album.
Now the Flaming Lips, with their friends Stardeath and the White Dwarfs, Peaches and Henry Rollins, have released their own version. I found the link to iTunes here. I think it’s incredible. I have to admit I followed that RapidShare link first. But it’s good enough that I subsequently bought from iTunes.
What I love about it is that it’s so raw. It’s fairly obviously recorded as a live session, rather than a carefully controlled set of overdubs. There’s excitement in the performance. Notes are fluffed, timings are loose, it’s organic and beautiful.
I particularly love Money, in which a synth sub-bass loses its tuning as the song goes on, playing in unison with the guitar that’s doing the main riff, drifting in and out.
I’ve not enjoyed an album this much for ages.