The Flaming Lips have been somewhat nostalgic lately. Earlier this year they released Flaming Side of the Moon, a companion album to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and their latest project is With A Little Help From My Fwends, a full album cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We now have our first glimpse of Fwends—a cover of “Fixing a Hole,” in which Wayne Coyne somehow manages to take a seminal psychedelic tune and make it 10 times trippier.
That’s to be expected, I suppose: any mixture of the Lips’ hallucinatory sound and Sgt. Pepper’s psychedelia is bound to be pretty out there. The cover, technically done by Coyne and Steven Drozd’s alter ego band Electric Würms, sounds like it was recorded in an echo chamber—both the lilting vocal and gentle guitar are drenched in reverb. It’s a fever dream of a cover, and hopefully the rest of the album is as satisfying. With A Little Help From My Fwends is out in October.
