I first encountered The Flaming Lips in the late 80s while in college. At the time, they seemed to be just one of many spaced out garage psych/punk bands that populated the college radio airwaves. I was into their second album, Oh My Gawd!, mainly because of one track that was particularly brilliant and stood out from the pack: the verbosely titled "One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning". At over nine minutes, the song builds slowly from a quiet, spacy haze to a tense instrumental section that climaxes in roaring guitar riffs before settling back to the haze where it began. The band were still relatively unskilled musically and vocally at this time, but I've always loved a good multipart epic, and that tune delivered. Unfortunately, their next album, Telepathic Surgery, failed to excite me so I stopped following them for a while.
The key creative players in the Flaming Lips at this point are guitarist-vocalist Wayne Coyne (in the forefront of the photo) and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd (to his right), who joined the band in the early 90s. After Drozd joined, the band turned increasingly experimental, effectively making the band into the 90s standard bearers of the "what will they do next?" camp (a role that Pink Floyd had arguably played a generation before).
The first major stunt the Flaming Lips revealed was Zaireeka (1997), released on four CDs designed to be played simultaneously. Since then, their (some might say gimmicky) advances have included: a six-hour long song ("I Found a Star on the Ground"); a 24-hour-long song ("6 Skies H3", a track I've listened to a couple of times and really enjoy bits of); a full-album reinterpretation of Dark Side of the Moon; a double album with Miley Cyrus (Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz (2017)); and other stuff I haven't looked into yet. As a result, The Flaming Lips have acquired a reputation in the modern music scene as the standard-bearers of experimentation and boundary-pushing. Understandably, there has been some backlash for self-indulgence particularly for the Cyrus collaboration, which was not received well by either fanbase. Despite their zany side projects, The Lips have taken the main body of their album discography seriously and continue to release interesting music to this day.
But back to The Soft Bulletin.... One endearing aspect of The Flaming Lips is their childlike view of the world - naive but passionate, and free of the filters and hangups that we acquire as we age and settle into social norms. Take "Race for the Prize", the album's opening track. It begins with a harp flourish and a bold Mellotron theme, setting up pensive lyrics that touchingly describe two scientists both working on a cure (for what, it doesn't say), emphasizing the very human aspects of competition, passion, determination, and dedication to family:
Two scientists were racing for the good of all mankind
Both of them side by side, so determined
Locked in heated battle for the cure that is their prize
But it's so dangerous, but they're determined
Theirs is to win if it kills them
They're just humans with wives and children
Closer to home, "The Spiderbite Song" describes the singer's true feelings about a real accident his bandmate had:
When you got that spiderbite on your hand
I thought we would have to break up the band
To lose your arm would surely upset your brain
The poison then could reach your heart from a vein
I was glad that it didn't destroy you
How sad that would be
Cos if it destroyed you
It would destroy me
The Flaming Lips have many fine albums to their name, but The Soft Bulletin, if not their best effort (debatable), draws a clear dividing line between their psychedelic guitar band phase and their experimental pop architect phase. The division is overly simplified, as they've always been experimental to a degree and they never completely abandoned guitars but, as Radiohead had done with OK Computer, they elevated their art to a level higher than bands of their generation had tried before. This greatly increased their stature among rock critics and expanded their fanbase to include listeners who might otherwise not have cared to check them out.
Overall, The Soft Bulletin is not an album I play very often, and I tend to lose interest by the end of the album, but it's emblematic of a new sophistication in alternative rock that valued the production and conceptual ambitions drawn from progressive rock giants of years past.
Dan:
The Soft Bulletin is surely one of the biggest surprises amongst the albums that Steve elected for the blog. With Steve flown from the family nest, I missed out on most of the under-the-radar rock albums while I concentrated on work and a career move that brought us to Atlanta in 1995. Coincidentally, Steve had already moved to Atlanta, so it was kind of a reunification of the family, along with Amy settling down later in Charlotte NC, a mere 4-hour drive away. But I digress. Coming to The Soft Bulletin fresh allows me to appreciate what I missed but now can include in the conceptual scaffolding where I store all my arcane musical knowledge.
Steve mentioned The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds as a possible reference point for the Lips, and I can definitely hear that connection. Its childishness also reminds me of the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour. Not many prog bands delve into such influences, and fewer pull it off as well as The Flaming Lips do, at least on The Soft Bulletin, which remains my only encounter with the band. I'm making mental notes to spend more time with this record just to feel the positive vibes emanating mainly from the instrumental arrangements but also from the few lyrics I could understand well enough without seeing them written out. I'm encouraged that there might be more overlooked gems out there to diversify my prog rock portfolio.
Further notes: I've read some pretty rave reviews of the 2-LP vinyl versions released in 2011 and 2019. I can imagine the enhanced soundstage for the orchestrations on LP, as the CD tends to put everything in the middle. Also, I notice that the CD has multiple versions of a couple of songs whereas the LP format omits them. Nice to have a choice, I suppose.
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