THE SOFT BULLETIN
The Flaming Lips
1999

Not one of the eight Flaming Lips albums before The Soft Bulletin is a bad album. They’re all very solid indie rock. The base pleasures of Wayne’s singing and their riff-writing maintain a solid development period. But the best Flaming Lips songs prior to The Soft Bulletin are fun diversions, often intentionally so. “She Don’t Use Jelly,” “This Here Giraffe,” “Turn It On,” these are fun songs (and in fact, I miss some of that Primus-adjacent spirit of “Turn It On” in their later years!) but they aren’t anthems.

The Flaming Lips ascend to the mainstream with The Soft Bulletin, its more complex musicality rivaling the intricacy of Radiohead’s OK Computer in a format more accessible than the four-LP experiment of Zaireeka. But, really, I think it’s less the complexity that attracted the mass attention that would allow them to blossom into one of America’s great rock bands with Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and instead the escalation of stakes in their music. This happens lyrically, but it also happens sonically – the melodies are soar, and those new instrumental layers and drum machines arrive in sequence across each track’s runtime. This is not the maximalism of the 70s brought back directly – it’s repeatedly stripped back across the album down to the sound they mastered as indies.

I get that some people will never enjoy Wayne Coyne’s voice. It’s almost impossible to express how inescapable “Do You Realize??” was when I was a teenager. In the time right after Limp Bizkit and alongside James Blunt and Mika, I got very used to his thin, often pitchy lead vocals. I think it never sounds better than on The Soft Bulletin, where on a song like “The Spiderbite Song,” it disarms the Queen-like piano and drum arrangement and keeps a sense of humor around the lyrics. It makes him sound small enough that these near-misses with death could have destroyed him. That his final verse avoids talking about his own father’s death feels like he understands the character he’s built on The Soft Bulletin.

It’s this juxtaposition of soft-and-strong that makes The Flaming Lips a perfect anthem band for 1999. It lends a sincerity that the adult contemporary bands of the early 2000s like Coldplay and Train never bridged. Stripping back to the quietude of “What is The Light?”’s piano and bass drum intro or allowing nearly two full minutes of “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” to pass before allowing any percussion to re-enter lends indie cred that kept The Flaming Lips cool. Well – sure, critics and audiences thought they were cool, but I just mean that I think they’re cool too.

KEY TRACKS: “Race for the Prize,” “The Spiderbite Song,” “Waitin For A Superman”
CATALOG CHOICE: Clouds Taste Metallic, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
NEXT STOP: Go Farther In Lightness, Gang of Youths
AFTER THAT: The Man Who Sold the World, David Bowie