"Nothing really matters to meeeeee..."

As you may or may not know, there was a Queen tribute album released yesterday. Normally this information would pass briefly through my head while reading allmusic.com's new release newsletter and be filed away way in the back until somebody demanded to know which shitty pop-punk band massacred "Killer Queen," at which point I may possibly remember that the answer is Sum 41.

But this one is different. You knew there had to be somebody doing "Bohemian Rhapsody," but would you have guessed it would be The Flaming Lips*?! This is genuinely exciting news. If there's any band in the world today that can capture the stupid operatic bombast of that track, it's the Flaming Lips. (I'd wager that The Polyphonic Spree could pull off an even better version, but I'll take what I can get.) Unfortunately, all I can find so far are 45 second clips on various Queen-related websites, so if somebody gets a hold of the whole thing, be sure to let me know. The clip I heard sounds like no other Flaming Lips recording I've ever heard. It's like they kept the kitchen-sink arrangements from The Soft Bulletin (the reverb-drenched organ and synths, the church bells, and so many overdubs of everything that you're not even sure what you're hearing) but added the big guitars from their early days. Plus, you know... they're doing "Bohemian Rhapsody." I need to hear this in all its glory, because I'm sure the Lips have done it justice while adding their own uniqueness to it. But obviously I need to hear it without paying for it, because I have no interest in hearing the rest of it.

*There are actually two versions of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the disc, the other one performed by the guy named Constantine who was in the last American Idol, backed by the cast of the other current major endeavor to destroy the last bit of Freddie Mercury's dignity, the musical We Will Rock You. This is one of the few tracks I've been able to find in full (as opposed to short clips), and it sounds so close to the original that I wonder why they even bothered, other than that the vocals have obviously been digitally corrected for pitch, as opposed to the Queen version, which utilized a crazy little thing called "talent" to make sure the vocals were in tune. At any rate, it's an exercise in pointlessness, because everything is literally EXACTLY the same, right down to things like the lyrics "Easy come, easy go, little high, little low" in the beginning panned left to right like in the original ("easy come" left, "easy go" right, etc.).