"The Soft Bulletin" - The Flaming Lips
When the 90's were searching for the new century
Through my life I have had a handful of records dropped into my universe at just the right moment. I am an obsessive listener and when I am taken in by an album I dissect it completely. Like a school of piranha on a submerged dead carcass, by the time I am finished with an album, I have listened it to death.
“The Soft Bulletin” was introduced to me by a friend who I was making a record with when I was about 20 years old. I’d heard of the Flaming Lips before but never really got into them, their most commercially successful record “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” had come out when I was in middle school and the most popular songs from that album were certainly passed around on mix cd’s friends and I made in those few years before the iPod came out.
My music tastes had changed in those passing years, as a budding guitarist my middle school years were all guitar heavy rock n’ roll, but by the time I’d hit 20 I’d grown more interested in folk music and psychedelic rock. I’d gone through a predictive Beatles phase, obsessing over Sgt. Pepper and the White Album and being introduced to the genius of Pet Sounds. So by the time I was introduced to “the Soft Bulletin” in 2009 I had been primed to appreciate its strange and beautiful mysticism.
That year I’d been working on my debut Like Lions project which had started out as a relatively standard five piece indie-folk outfit. I recruited friends to help on bass, piano, drums and an electric guitar while I picked and strummed a group of five songs I’d written. By the time we started thinking about other ways to color the songs we’d added a few more songs and the project was turning into a full length album. My producer and friend Ben Kersten one day was describing a drum sound he wanted to try and re-create and he mentioned a song from “the Soft Bulletin”, curious I asked him to burn me a copy of the album to listen to that weekend.
I remember slipping the silver CD with Soft Bulletin scrawled in sharpie into the CD player of the Zip Car I’d rented to go to the studio that day. Track one, “Race for the Prize” starts with a couple snare flams then high strings and synths swirl around a raucous overdriven drum beat all leading to Wayne Coyne’s unmistakable shaky tenor voice singing, “two scientists are racing for the good of all mankind!” I was hooked. I wanted to be a scientist.
One song after another I was transported into what felt like both the future and the past. While the songs were full of synthesizers and drum machines that would become common place in the coming decade, you could also see inspiration drawn from Brian Wilson’s cartoonish song structures and the thwarting of common instrumentation groupings, you could read the pseudo-pyschedelic lyrics like some turn of the century Sgt. Pepper, using each song’s short story to build on some longer them, an album meant to be heard in sequential order and in entirety.
As the album works its way toward arguably its masterpiece “Suddenly Everything Has Changed”, you are transformed by the beauty creeping between mangled guitars and distorted drums. When “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” begins, close your eyes, you can actually feel your body begin to disintegrate into the music.
The mid to late 90’s and early 2000’s were such a unique and interesting time in music. The advent of digital audio workstations (DAW’s for short) in combination with better sounding sampling had made for an environment where it was cheaper and easier to build out songs with dozens of instruments and endless vocal harmonies. Experimenting was easier than it had ever been, electronic components easier to integrate but live studios were still used to mic’ing up amps and recording live drums. “The Soft Bulletin” is in my opinion one of the greatest examples of this era, it mixed all these components so perfectly and contains a rawness you don’t often find anymore.
If you haven’t listened to this great album before, I highly suggest giving it a listen, and if it’s been while, put it in queue and give it a listen this holiday break, I imagine you’ll be transported just as I am every time that snare flam hits and those high strings kick in.