You might just have to take a blind leap of faith with me on this point.īut The Soft Bulletin's greatest strength lies in its cohesive themes, the way it ebbs and flows with tension between victory and defeat. Pepper by The Beatles is an album that accomplishes this.
The Wizard of OZ, Willy Wonka, The Royal Tenenbaums, Pulp Fiction - these are all stories that accomplish this. That's not something I can quantify for you, it's just something a person feels. Like any good story, The Soft Bulletin succeeds in creating a unique universe for the listener. Like following the white rabbit down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, thus begins this odd journey. The Soft Bulletin is loaded with similar sound experiments throughout, blurring the line between noise and music. Best of all, the keyboards sound a little like they're gasping for breath on their deathbed, like they're being bent and stretched in unnatural sounding ways.
And then, once the scene has been established, in comes Wayne with that fragile, lovable voice (or, if you're new to The Lips, it's the annoyingly shaky voice), singing the words to a story that starts, "Two scientists were racing for the good of all mankind / Both of them side-by-side / So determined." Like most of The Soft Bulletin, this first song is lush with keyboards and backing vocals singing ahhs and oohs set to a galloping rhythm. You can picture the stage curtains spread apart as the show begins, the loud echoing drum snares and the "ta da!" keyboards. Once the music starts playing, right away you are drawn into the theater of this album. Those songs laid the foundation for their next release, 1999's The Soft Bulletin. And once the Zaireeka recordings were finished, their identity understood, they were left with a few songs that just didn't work with the four-disc concept. Understanding this helped them to cement their identity. They realized then that they weren't a live rock band who records albums rather, The Flaming Lips were a studio band that loved to tinker and experiment behind closed doors. But Coyne says on the band's website that it was during the Zaireeka recordings that they gained the enlightenment they'd been searching for. So what do you do when creatively you're starting to actualize but nobody's listening? You've already been dismissed as "the Vaseline song" band? If you're Wayne Coyne & The Lips, you go back to the studio and record Zaireeka, a four-disc album intended to played all at once. It was a surprisingly creative collection of songs that went largely unnoticed by the public. It's the book that an author tries to write his whole career and finally does.īack in the mid '90's, The Lips released an album called Clouds Taste Metallic. This is where The Lips most clearly express their artistic vision. This is The Flaming Lips' finest musical concoction, the album that took them into rock royalty and crowned them as darlings.
The highs aren't as high, the lows aren't as low.īut neither At War With The Mystics nor Yoshimi accomplish what The Soft Bulletin does. Yet Mystics isn't quite the opus that both of those other records manage to be. It's a mishmash of electrosonic space rock, with a bit more straightforward rock than Yoshimi or The Soft Bulletin. The band's most recent release, At War With The Mystics, carries on with the precedent set by the previous two records. They write songs with unusual titles like "Pilot Can at the Queer of God" and "Rainin' Babies." They were best known throughout the '90's as "the band who sang that song about Vaseline." And yet somehow over the span of their last three releases, The Flaming Lips took the leap from "weird indie fringe act" to "essential rock band." Lead singer Wayne Coyne has been seen performing from inside a human-sized bubble ball. They sometimes wear fury animal outfits and fake blood. They've built a reputation for being one of America's most outlandish and absurd rock 'n roll acts. The Flaming Lips have been around for about 20 years now.
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