The space between uplifting pop and out-and-out weirdness is a fertile area successfully mined by the Beatles, who showed how transcendent pop could be: match indelible tunes with the strangest sounds and lyrics and a splendid time is guaranteed for all. In search of similar highs, the Flaming Lips – with “fwends” (ugh) including Moby, My Morning Jacket and J Mascis – here attempt to reconnect us to the more out-there side of the Beatles by covering the whole of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the mothership of 60s psychedelia. 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 – isn’t this just what we’d expect the Flaming Lips to do? The most mind-blowing moments come from Miley Cyrus, who sings Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and the middle section of A Day in the Life deadpan – and in doing so takes them to another dimension.
