Published on Jan 30, 2001
At first,
The Soft Bulletin may sound like an album that you need be a
bitter graduate student to enjoy: It has song titles like “The
Spiderbite Song,” Wayne Coyne, the lead singer, has a high-pitch,
shaky voice and at first listen,
The Soft Bulletin is a whole lot to digest.
Let it sink in though, and
The Soft Bulletin feels right at home with other sprawling
epics like
The Wall or
Operation:Mindcrime. Some tracks sound like they could have
been recorded in a garage while others, such as the sweeping, “A
Spoonful Weighs A Ton” will test the limits of your headphones. The
band proudly displays the “concept album” tag on this album by
making some of the credits appear to be credits on a movie
poster.
The Soft Bulletin is a great grasp at making a typical rock
record from a group that is anything but. Coyne once produced a
small symphony featuring the sounds of car engines and their last
album,
Zaireeka, could only reach its maximum effect if the 4-disc
set was played on 4 separate audio systems simultaneously. That
trick may have been used to bring Flaming Lips fans together, but
it’s hard to find another Flaming Lips fan in a small town, yet
alone three to share that experience.
The Flaming Lips, like Radiohead, were deceptively tagged as a
“one-hit-wonder band” when they appeared on “Beverly Hills 90210.”
The Top 40 song “She Don’t Use Jelly” immediately cast them as a
novelty, even though they were struggling since they formed in 1983
in Oklahoma City. Still, all of their creative weirdness paid off
with
The Soft Bulletin.
Some bands try to produce a piece as weird as possible to thin
out the heard of fans who “jumped on the bandwagon.” In The Flaming
Lips’ case, the band members are genuinely eccentric as hell and
are making an honest effort to connect with the audience. For as
odd as a song as “The Spiderbite Song” is, the song came from a
true story. One of the band members did sustain a spider bite wound
on his hand, and almost had to have it amputated as a result.
Therefore, the once goofy lyric, “When you got that spider bite on
your hand/ I thought we would have to break up the band,” rings
true.
The heartbeat that you hear on “What Is The Light” seamlessly
fits itself in with percussion and keyboards. The song, which is
about whether the chemical sensation of what we know as “being in
love” is the same chemical that caused the “Big Bang” is both a
trippy odyssey and emotionally draining. Perhaps the biggest
technical marvel on
The Soft Bulletin is the sweeping march-like epic, “The
Gash.” The percussion, which even includes gong, backs up Coyne’s
best lyric in the album, where he cries out, “Will the fight for
our sanity/ be the fight of our lives?”
The album is bookended by two songs, “Race For The Prize” and
“Waiting For Superman.” Some may call putting in a song twice in an
album a gimmick, but these two songs neatly tie in the themes for
The Soft Bulletin. It is a big album, full of big ideas, but
deep down, it’s an album that everyone would have on their high-fi
and listening to in their basement if it were released 25 years
ago. Don’t let the weirdness of this group’s past fool you:
The Soft Bulletin thoroughly rocks.