At first,
\nThe Soft Bulletin<\/i> may sound like an album that you need be a
\nbitter graduate student to enjoy: It has song titles like “The
\nSpiderbite Song,” Wayne Coyne, the lead singer, has a high-pitch,
\nshaky voice and at first listen,
\nThe Soft Bulletin<\/i> is a whole lot to digest.<\/p>\n
Let it sink in though, and
\nThe Soft Bulletin<\/i> feels right at home with other sprawling
\nepics like
\nThe Wall<\/i> or
\nOperation:Mindcrime<\/i>. Some tracks sound like they could have
\nbeen recorded in a garage while others, such as the sweeping, “A
\nSpoonful Weighs A Ton” will test the limits of your headphones. The
\nband proudly displays the “concept album” tag on this album by
\nmaking some of the credits appear to be credits on a movie
\nposter.<\/p>\n
\nThe Soft Bulletin<\/i> is a great grasp at making a typical rock
\nrecord from a group that is anything but. Coyne once produced a
\nsmall symphony featuring the sounds of car engines and their last
\nalbum,
\nZaireeka<\/i>, could only reach its maximum effect if the 4-disc
\nset was played on 4 separate audio systems simultaneously. That
\ntrick may have been used to bring Flaming Lips fans together, but
\nit’s hard to find another Flaming Lips fan in a small town, yet
\nalone three to share that experience.<\/p>\n
The Flaming Lips, like Radiohead, were deceptively tagged as a
\n“one-hit-wonder band” when they appeared on “Beverly Hills 90210.”
\nThe Top 40 song “She Don’t Use Jelly” immediately cast them as a
\nnovelty, even though they were struggling since they formed in 1983
\nin Oklahoma City. Still, all of their creative weirdness paid off
\nwith
\nThe Soft Bulletin<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Some bands try to produce a piece as weird as possible to thin
\nout the heard of fans who “jumped on the bandwagon.” In The Flaming
\nLips’ case, the band members are genuinely eccentric as hell and
\nare making an honest effort to connect with the audience. For as
\nodd as a song as “The Spiderbite Song” is, the song came from a
\ntrue story. One of the band members did sustain a spider bite wound
\non his hand, and almost had to have it amputated as a result.
\nTherefore, the once goofy lyric, “When you got that spider bite on
\nyour hand\/ I thought we would have to break up the band,” rings
\ntrue.<\/p>\n
The heartbeat that you hear on “What Is The Light” seamlessly
\nfits itself in with percussion and keyboards. The song, which is
\nabout whether the chemical sensation of what we know as “being in
\nlove” is the same chemical that caused the “Big Bang” is both a
\ntrippy odyssey and emotionally draining. Perhaps the biggest
\ntechnical marvel on
\nThe Soft Bulletin<\/i> is the sweeping march-like epic, “The
\nGash.” The percussion, which even includes gong, backs up Coyne’s
\nbest lyric in the album, where he cries out, “Will the fight for
\nour sanity\/ be the fight of our lives?”<\/p>\n
The album is bookended by two songs, “Race For The Prize” and
\n“Waiting For Superman.” Some may call putting in a song twice in an
\nalbum a gimmick, but these two songs neatly tie in the themes for
\nThe Soft Bulletin<\/i>. It is a big album, full of big ideas, but
\ndeep down, it’s an album that everyone would have on their high-fi
\nand listening to in their basement if it were released 25 years
\nago. Don’t let the weirdness of this group’s past fool you:
\nThe Soft Bulletin<\/i> thoroughly rocks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":25820,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6572],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-37026","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-flaming-lips","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37026"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=37026"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=37026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}