FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
The Flaming Lips – The Soft Bulletin
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I have spent a lot of time …
in the 1990s with this feature. The Flaming Lips’ ninth studio album, The Soft Bulletin, arrived in 1999, and it was a departure for the band. Critics hailed the album, and it was a step away from their guitar-heavy Alternative Rock; this was the band employing more layers and producing more intricate work. If some took a bit of time to readjust, the accessible and catchy songs definitely resonated soon enough; their previous album, Zaireeka, was an album of experimental sounds which, looking back, could not be more different to The Soft Bulletin! I am putting this album in Vinyl Corner, as a live album was released last year. The Soft Bulletin: Recorded Live At Red Rocks Amphitheatre is the vinyl I would recommend - or you can buy the original and compare the two. Maybe one would stream the original and buy the live vinyl. Whatever strategy you employ, The Soft Bulletin is an album that you need to investigate! In terms of listening experiences, there are few as spellbinding as listening to the album played by an orchestra and having this hugely magical sound come from the speakers! When The A.V. Club assessed the album twenty years after its release, they had this to say:
“Starting with Hear It Is in 1986, Oklahoma City outfit The Flaming Lips had a pretty routine schedule in their earliest years. Every 18 months or so, they’d put out a psychedelic, guitar-infused garage-rock record, with a few almost-single-worthy hits and maybe a fun cover. This output got the Lips signed to Warner Bros. by album number five, and number six, Transmissions From The Satellite Heart, contained the closest they had come to a hit single: “She Don’t Use Jelly,” which they even performed on the Fox teen hit 90210.
After Transmissions follow-up Clouds Taste Metallic, however, the Lips took a bit of a departure with 1997’s Zaireeka, which consisted of four CDs intended to be played simultaneously. Not only did that effort strain the band’s finances, as music journalist Jim DeRogatis points out in his 2007 Flaming Lips biography, Staring At Sound, but also it presented a considerable hurdle for live touring. Frontman Wayne Coyne attempted to solve the problem by creating the “BoomBox Experiments,” which involved the band carting around 40 boom boxes and drafting friends in several cities to help press all the buttons simultaneously during the live set.
guitars to tell the story of two dueling scientists in a race to save humanity. In Staring At Sound, DeRogatis says that Coyne describes the song as “his ideal combination of Frank Sinatra and Led Zeppelin, and which neatly encompasses several of his recurring themes: Seize the moment; dare to live life to the fullest; believe in yourself, work hard, and you can accomplish anything.”
In the press release sent out with the record, Coyne—very Brian Wilson-like—states, “If someone was to ask me what instrument I play, I would say the recording studio.” That’s the overall effect of Soft Bulletin from this very first track: Coyne and his bandmates culminating into a strange and melodious orchestra, led by Coyne’s purposefully nasal vocals. The band continues in that vein, throwing everything at second track “A Spoonful Weighs A Ton”—angelic voices and heavenly strings that are soon overpowered by powerful percussion underlining the song’s undeniable riff. Since their inception as a band, the Lips’ had always been able to weave an irrepressible hook into the middle of whatever bizarre musical concoction they were crafting, and that foundation makes the tracks on Soft Bulletin imminently listenable even amidst all the complex orchestration. With lines like “Heard louder than a gun / The sound they made was love,” the song further developed Soft Bulletin’s theme of the binding power of love, delivered via bracingly original instrumentation”.
It is an album that sounds extraordinary to this day, and it seems to unveil new surprises and joys each time it is played! I love the album, and I wonder whether The Flaming Lips will release another record soon – last year, they put out King's Mouth. It is clear that The Soft Bulletin remains their masterpiece. Maybe that is just my opinion, but there are plenty who share that view. In their review of The Soft Bulletin, this is what AllMusic wrote:
“So where does a band go after releasing the most defiantly experimental record of its career? If you're the Flaming Lips, you keep rushing headlong into the unknown -- The Soft Bulletin, their follow-up to the four-disc gambit Zaireeka, is in many ways their most daring work yet, a plaintively emotional, lushly symphonic pop masterpiece eons removed from the mind-warping noise of their past efforts. Though more conventional in concept and scope than Zaireeka, The Soft Bulletin clearly reflects its predecessor's expansive sonic palette. Its multidimensional sound is positively celestial, a shape-shifting pastiche of blissful melodies, heavenly harmonies, and orchestral flourishes; but for all its headphone-friendly innovations, the music is still amazingly accessible, never sacrificing popcraft in the name of radical experimentation. (Its aims are so perversely commercial, in fact, that hit R&B remixer Peter Mokran tinkered with the cuts "Race for the Prize" and "Waitin' for a Superman" in the hopes of earning mainstream radio attention.) But what's most remarkable about The Soft Bulletin is its humanity -- these are Wayne Coyne's most personal and deeply felt songs, as well as the warmest and most giving.
No longer hiding behind surreal vignettes about Jesus, zoo animals, and outer space, Coyne pours his heart and soul into each one of these tracks, poignantly exploring love, loss, and the fate of all mankind; highlights like "The Spiderbite Song" and "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" are so nakedly emotional and transcendentally spiritual that it's impossible not to be moved by their beauty. There's no telling where the Lips will go from here, but it's almost beside the point -- not just the best album of 1999, The Soft Bulletin might be the best record of the entire decade”.
It was that shift from the experimental to the much more grounded that really surprised a lot of people. I guess there are bands who have provided similarly radical leaps between albums, but The Flaming Lips’ evolution on The Soft Bulletin is stunning. I will wrap things up in a bit, but I wanted to quote from a Pitchfork review of 1999 that mentions the role of producer Dave Fridmann:
“A big key to the success of The Soft Bulletin is producer Dave Fridmann. Fridmann's an aural genius who did wonders with his band Mercury Rev's last album, Deserter's Songs. As great as that album was, this is a bigger, bolder leap. Sure, the moment you hear the strings on the second cut, "A Spoonful Weighs a Ton", you're thinking 'bout the Rev. That's only half the battle, though:
The song alternates between pixie dust and angel dust-- first it flows, then it swaggers with a killer Moog-and-drum battle with the audience going Qui-Gon at the altar of the Bulletin. The following cut, "The Spark That Bled", is even more adventurous. Coyne's little boy vocals take on a philharmonic of yearning, tackling it down with its ambiguous "I stood up and I said 'Yeah'" chorus. 4AD used to be this dreamy-- now they're picking at leftover Red House Painters demos and wondering when people are going to like Kristin Hersh. (Never, by the way.) This is on Warner Brothers?!
Oh, but there's more. So much more. Drummer Steven Drozd gets mad props for his thundering percussion which, for the most part, was recorded on one microphone. Hard to believe during a dense number like my personal favorite track, "The Gash". As much as I giggled over the title, I was bowled over by the song. A gospel choir sings an inspirational (!) song of perseverance over tweaked synth tracks and louder-than-Christ funky drumming. I defy you to listen to it without seeing just how loud your stereo can get.
Drozd also makes quick work of "Waitin' for a Superman", another inspirational piece-- one that was inspired by the death of Coyne's father. The result is this band's "Losing My Religion". Seriously. If Top 40 gets ahold of this song, we're all going to be very, very sick of it. Still, it's an amazing track, a shuffling dirge with a few bells, and two amazingly well-placed trumpet blasts, but mostly just some slightly hungover piano.
Speaking of death, it's a lingering theme on The Soft Bulletin. "Suddenly Everything Has Changed" is a neat, twisty little ditty about how thoughts of mortality can attack you when you least expect it. "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" is a more direct rumination on the subject, a dreamy blast of vacuum cleaner guitar and reverb, reverb, reverb! Again, hardly party music, but remember Dark Side of the Moon? Pass the bong. This is some good shit”.
Although it is a little expensive buying The Soft Bulletin on vinyl – the studio version -, it is well worth the investment. Alternatively, you can get the recent live edition, and revel in its magnificence. Whatever method you choose, ensure you make The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin part of your life. Over twenty years since its release, this album still…
HAS the power to move the senses.