The Soft Bulletin

US Version 22 June 1999
1. Race for the Prize (Mokran mix)
2. A Spoonful Weighs A Ton
3. The Spark That Bled (The Softest Bullet Ever Shot)
4. The Spiderbite Song
5. Buggin' (The buzz of love is busy buggin' you) 6. What Is The Light? (An untested hypothesis suggesting that the chemical [in our brains] by which we are able to experience the sensation of being in love is the same chemical that caused the "Big Bang" that was the birth of the accelerating universe)
7. The Observer
8. Waitin' For Superman (A good time for a super man to life the Sun into the sky)
9. Suddenly Everything Has Changed (Moments of routine and boredom that cause you to daydream or reflect on the nature of reality sometimes with maddeningly melancholy results
10. The Gash (Battle Hymn for the wounded mathematician)
11. Feeling Yourself Disintegrate
12. Sleeping on the Roof (excerpt from "Should We Keep The Severed Head Awake??")
13. Race for the Prize (sacrifice of the new scientists)
14. Superman (Mokran mix)
produced by The Flaming Lips, Dave Fridmann and Scott Booker

"The Soft Bulletin is at once dazzling in its sonic inventiveness and completely accessible. Album of the Month. 5 (out of 5) stars - a classic."   -- Uncut (UK) May '99

This is where 'The Soft Bulletin' begins, as it immediately launches into two tales of science and confrontation of the unsolved. In "Race For The Prize", two scientists who are striving to save the world by finding the cure to a disease. Can they cope with the pressure of expectation? Can they continue to operate at the vista of the unknowable and hold on to their ordinary lives as family men? Perversely, this is a totally driven and pure pop song, with the massive beats and driven piano playing providing movements of startlingly original bombast and forlorn empathy. "A Spoonful Weighs A Ton" deals with some more scientists who are gambling with a planet's time by carrying out an unstoppable experiment with the sun. Flutes, strings, harps, drum machines, and perhaps the deepest bass you ever heard fire through the incredible stereo mix. The people are aghast at the risk, but the scientists forge ahead and their bravery finds them love, as their refusal to wait for the end saves the world.

The Flaming Lips have never believed in standing still, be it through the accidental musical inventiveness of the 'mediocre musicians' (see Wayne's sleeve notes to "1984-1990"), or capitalising on the new ideas that changes in personnel can bring. However, following the departure of guitar noise wizard Ronald Jones in 1996, no one could truly have expected them to spend the next two years indulging their musical fantasies in such remarkably successful and entertaining ways. The hard part was always going to be returning to their main trade of creating unique pop records without leaving themselves and their audience with a feeling of having regressed.

When you're following a four CD simultaneous playing album ('Zaireeka') and live Boombox orchestras, the most sensible way forward is to take a giant leap closer to every musician's goal - the insanely inventive album with universal appeal. Obviously. Of course, you have to remember to work out how to take with you the ideas that the compositional space of multiple sound sources afforded. You also might as well finally escape your influences along the way, "We have accidentally made a record that is not a response to music that we love or a reaction against music that we hate. Finally, there are no more enemies, and there are no more heroes…just sound.."

It helps when you're smart enough to have set aside songs, to be fleshed out later on, that wouldn't quite work on four CDs, but holding on to the mindset is critical. Wayne may feel slightly lucky that the previous stop on their quest of experimentation has taken them to this place, "Our odyssey of experimentation had poisoned us and we hope, if we are lucky, to never fully detox from it," but the truth is that they've learned to keep going and forging on. When Wayne sings "What is the light that surrounds you?" within the pure atmosphere of yearning that is 'What Is The Light?' you can't help but wonder if they already have all the answers. It's a feeling that is especially real when the chorus comes ringing in with the refrain of, "Looking into space it surrounds you/love is the place that you're drawn to."

Indeed, 'The Soft Bulletin' shows the truth of the Flaming Lips growth and learning. The whole album is riddled with it - tales of exploration and tangential introversion set against the sounds of pure emotion that do nothing less than drive those tales home. In addition to that, the philosophical explorations are no longer tempered by the occasional forays into whimsy that trademarked previous releases. The word-play is still there but it's now used for the sake of description and to aid the conveying of the abstract ideas and confused feelings behind some of the futuristic and/or personal tales. The fact that the feelings are no longer driven by the music but are instead coaxed and welled into a fount of emotion means that, more than ever, these songs serve to touch, exhilarate, and (most importantly) entertain. Not only that but, coming from a band perennially associated with "difficult" guitar rock, this record has an array of surprisingly fresh rhythms and non-guitar sound textures. Indeed, at one point in time,there were going to be no guitars at all on this record.

Nowhere are the intense emotions more evident than on "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate". Even this saddest of songs touches the heart in a positive way. As Wayne vocalises the experience of learning to accept the loss of someone dear, the voices swirl through the chaotic yet soothingly regular sounds of the rhythm tracks, and you find the feeling that life is too beautiful to dwell too long on thoughts of death. "Suddenly Everything Has Changed" is another key moment, describing the real experience of being caught unawares by morbid daydreaming in the midst of the most mundane events in everyday life. As the music shifts gear, Wayne ponders the juxtaposition that although his actions are unaltered, something has occurred to cause life to be fundamentally different in the personal sense. Probably.

"(Waitin' For) Superman" revisits expectation, fear and the ability to be there for the people that count. Ominous beats, chiming piano chords and the feeling of chaos under the languid surface of the song say all that needs to be said about the oppression of circumstance and trying to hold on for relief. "The Gash", on the other hand, deals with what happens when it all becomes too much, and ponders how some people always keep going, "And the fight for our sanity will be the fight of our lives." A curious combination of a marching theme, a hymn, and operatic melodrama, this remains a pop song of epic proportions.

The album proper closes with the aching contemplation of "Sleeping On The Roof". Following the roller-coaster of imagination and exploration that has gone before, this instrumental somehow sums it all up into three minutes of beautiful sound, through the combination of the simplicity of the environment with a melodic thought - crickets, refrigerators, and shimmering keyboard sounds. So we come full circle, over the ups and downs, past the absurdities buried in the mundane, to the lesson of change. If you work out how to come out of the other side a better person, your sanity intact, then maybe the prize is within reach. In this case the prize is a pop music album that sounds wholeheartedly new and impressively real.

"4 out of 5 stars"   -- Melody Maker May 15, 1999