Customer Reviews

Soft Bulletin, the

5 star:		(230)
4 star:		(35)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

s an aging, sarcastic man, The Flaming Lips remain my favorite contemporary group because they demolish two short-sighted contemporary rock 'n' roll notions: you have to be young and serious. Wayne's salt-and-pepper beard, pea coat and bullhorn raised the bar for any musician pushing forty. Another debatable myth dispelled by The Soft Bulletin is that heroin destroys. Steven Drozd's addiction to the horse was hard and heavy right through the production of Yoshimi, and his addition to the band clearly took them to their current creative level. Aside from Keith Richards, has anyone produced such godlike music while mired in the junk, that it almost seems like an endorsement for the drug?

Remarkably, the band's music maintains a general air of feel-goodness while their lyrics concern sobering subjects as bleeding, bites, and mortality. Death seeps from within every sweeping disco-ball light bath of a song, deep down to the drummer's gums. A year after The Soft Bulletin's release a spider nailed my calf, corroding the skin. When detailing the infection I was constantly comforted by a poorly (perfectly?) sung refrain of, "When you got that spider bite on your leg!" That's cultural impact. The Flaming Lips: the official soundtrack of near-fatal insect bites.

The Flaming Lips have made an interesting career of changing it up on each album. If you listened to "Clouds Taste Metallic" (their album before this one) than listen to "Yoshimi" (their album after this one) you wouldn't know it was the same band. "The Soft Bulletin" isn't their most ambitious work (that would be Zaireeka) and it's not the most drastic change from their original works (that would be Yoshimi), but it was simply the next step that connects the growth of the band from "Clouds" to "Yoshimi."

So why is it their best? It's not the most ambitious, the most different, the most rocking or anything like that. Instead each track is a treasure in it's own way. The songs aren't very tied together but instead present a different sound with every new endeavor. From the happy go lucky love on "Buggin'" to the almost, dare I say, dance feel you get from the drums on "What is the Light." "Suddenly Everything Has Changed" presents a transformation of fast to slow over and over again. Even the two "remixes" present quite different sounds from the "unremixed" versions of the same songs. Rather than being "remixed" it seems to me the Lips just couldn't decide which version was better and decided to present them both. Each track is incredible in its own way. And while you could argue "Yoshimi" is a better album based on how the fact that each Lips album seems to be better than the next, "The Soft Bulletin" presents the Lips in a way that is familiar to all of their other works but still very different, and comes out, at least to me, as their best work to date.

or that's what one would gather from listening to this album. Really, Coyne can be a truly outstanding and remarkable frontman or he can be absolutely awful as shown in the Soft Bulletin. Now the Lips have some great works, such as Yoshimi and Transmissions From The Satellite Heart but this isn't one of them. All of the indie kids seem to love this album though, but from what I gather they just jumped on the Flaming Lips bandwagon a little too late and ended up loving the next album they made which happened to be this. Coyne essentially tears away all of the grinding, loud guitars from the earlier albums and all that is left is adult alternative, contemporary music that people in their fifties will love, merely for the fact that the music sounds pleasant enough. Coyne's never really had all that great of a voice to begin with but he's at his worst here. He's damn near unbearable in A Spoonful Weigh's A Ton. The whole album just sounds hollow, and the production values aren't anything to revel at, which is remarkable considering the Lips were aiming for a bombastic sound. There is some good stuff on here though including Buggin', Suddenly Everything Has Changed, and The Spiderbite Song. I'm really quite frustrated from the acclaim that this album gets when in reality their earlier albums are much more worty of it...

The Soft Bulletin is certainly one of the Flaming Lips best works. The soundscape on this album is incredibly vibrant, and detailed. It's clear that they know their way around a recording studio, but they never force recording tricks. They show a lot of restraint, every orchestra swell, or drum flourish flows and feels like it should be there.
Conceptually the album is tight. They take on some real issues here. Stuff that anyone can relate to, the songs are about human nature, death, love, and eternal struggle. The album kicks off with "Race for the Prize", an upbeat number about two scientists making the ultimate sacrifice to come up with The Cure. It's slightly silly, and playful on the surface, but its ultimately about 2 guys willing to die to save some lives. There's many songs that dwell on this subject. The second song "A Spoonful Weighs a Ton" alternates between an extremely sweet orchestra section, and a deep funky bass section. "The Gash"(my personal favorite) is a real freak out, with incredibly layered vocals of all different pitches singing again about the eternal struggle that scientists have, and how you have to march on no matter what, all over an offbeat piano riff, with an orchestra and electronic whirring. This song represents the band the best, it is silly and incredibly eccentric but still charming and meaningful.
Other songs go into more about mortality such as "Suddenly Everything has Changed" about how during everyday events your mind drifts to morbid thoughts or on "Waitin' for a Superman" where singer and chief songwriter Wayne Coyne deals with the burden of his father's death.
People complaining that this album means nothing and its about drummers who lost their arms, superman, headwounds, mosquito bites quite frankly missed the point. The songwriting here is meaningful, and poignant. Every song has a deeper meaning, but not so deep that you can't find it.
The Soft Bulletin is a great album that delivers on all levels. People looking for sheer joyful noise will find it, people looking for something with deep lyrics will find it, people looking distinct, catchy and great melodies will find them on every song. The album stands as a great pop album, and an extremely deep, artistic thinkpiece. It is definitely one of the best albums of the 90s and one of my favorites of all time. I think anyone that gives it a little time will find that every song is a gem. The Soft Bulletin is top-notch

This CD is very well made. Really. It doesn't scratch very easily. I've put it to the test rubbing it on various surfaces with minimal damage. I was also surprised to find that it was flame-retardant. To a degree. Holds up well in an earthquake too! Or at least I bet it would. I shook it pretty hard and it didn't break. The CD booklet smells slightly of fish, which was a slight turnoff at first, but it grew on me after a while.

Okay I know I'm ridiculous, but really. If you're going to listen to Flaming Lips, you gotta think like that. Amazing album by an amazing trio.

Imagine if Neil Young, Syd Barrett, Jon Anderson, Brian Wilson, and Arthur Lee all collided. Well, I can't imagine that mess either, but if ever an album could possibly sound that intriguingly bizzarre, this is the one. I won't even go into describing this improbable collision of diverse ideas, suffice it to say that this is one of the all-time pop/rock classics. A new standard. Sumptuously unorthodox, like a modern day Pet Sounds or Forever Changes. Even if you've yet to hear this album, perhaps you've caught the bouyantly jubilent "Buggin" in Austin Powers. Anyway, this is the current generation's Dark Side Of The Moon and Yoshimi (the Lips' amazing followup) is the modern Sgt. Pepper's. Incredibly, with life and death songs like "Race For The Prize" ("Two scientists are racing for the good of all mankind...Forging for the future but to sacrifice their lives...They're just humans with wives and children") and "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate", just two highlights on an album full of 'em, the Lips just don't come across as self-impressed. Somehow Wayne Coyne sounds like one of the most sincere artists in any music. Somehow his wonderfully intriguing lyrics and the music itself has made me get real. As Wayne said of Bulletin's songs, "I knew that we were singing a lot of songs that were bleak. They said, 'Look, we are all gonna die and we better (expletive) make the best of it.' ...'Let's live!'" No disrepect to the great Radiohead, but to this reviewer, especially after Amnesiac, their way of being confrontational sounds dirgy in comparison. Well, the lyrics in "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" suggest that we ought to appreciate what we have while we still can ("Love in our life is just too valuable/oh to feel for even a second without it/but life without death is just impossible/oh to realize something is ending within us..."). The Lips' music refuses to wilt in the shadow of death. This music is proof why we shouldn't give in. I'm yet another person who's life has benefited from hearing these guys. This may seem an exageration to some, but this is the truth. This is how music can make a REAL difference! So, if you want music that speaks to you instead of self-indulgently putting on a pose, then this is the band. This was the Lips best album yet in the eyes of many and even tops the best releases by the similarly quirky and creative Porcupine Tree and Radiohead, my opinion. Oh yeah, "The Gash" definitely is quite unlike anything I've ever heard before. Multi-instumentalist Steven Drozd's arranging on this track is brilliant, but then it is throughout the album. "Will the fight for our sanity be the fight of our lives...", sings Wayne in his winsomely assuring warble. This one song does everything that The Polyphonic Spree's entire debut tried admirably to do. The Soft Bulletin embodies everything that was ever great about the Lips' music, and widens it out to Cinemascope-like proportions. Magical. High Definition, audiophile-level sound quality. Producer Dave Fridmann is today's George Martin. Note: This is my revised version of the original review.

I have been somewhat of an on and off flaming lips fan, not being a huge fan of "transmissions" i had my doubts of purchasing any more music from the lips, but i gotta say they have come a long way, thank god for the internet huh? I have been updated to "clouds taste metallic" which is quite an amazing record, Then purchasing "yoshimi" and i can go on for hours on how great of an album that it is, Although this was the previous album i ended up buying it after "yoshimi" And its really hard for me to put my feelings about the lips in writing, from my dislike of "transmissions" and my love for the rest of their music, But the lips music isnt always catchy and takes a couple of spins to like it and a couple more to love it. I love this album, great songs, real cool work experimenting with the electronica side of music making it a real psychedelic trip. 5 stars , highly recomended. oh yeah about me disliking "transmissions" is something of the past after listening to the lips over and over, transmissions is a solid album not at all my favorite and at the bottom of the list but overall a good cd. BUY the soft BULLEtin it wont dissapoint

It's funny how the less intellegent reviewers vote this album as "over-rated" and "crap" with "terrible lyrics", and the more seasoned listeners say that this is one of the greatest records of all time. I am a big Flaming Lips fan, and you can call this album over-rated if you'd like, and maybe it is when people call it "the greatest album of the 90s" and so fourth, but to call it a bad record is really sort of immature. Considering that 90% of the music out there is uninventive and quite horrible, The Soft Bulletin is really innovate for rock music. Predictable Rock Radio Stations have made the rock really a sinking genre in terms of originality and diversiveness, but the Flaming Lips carry the torch of "real rock heroes" fairly well. As for the lyrics on this album, they are SUPPOSED to be limited and simplified, as a contrast to most of the contrived and overly emotional lyrics out there in almost EVERY OTHER BAND YOU HEAR. This is different. The words hit emotional peaks at certain moments, but in a more tinkering way that feels more wandering and less declarative. And I've always loved how dreamy The Flaming Lips lyrics are, free for anyone to interpret how they wish. So get off the lyrics: they're not "horrible", your taste in music is. This album really is great, and has a sound all it's own. If you're a smart rock fan, really pick this up. It grows a little with each listen. And to the reviewer who wrote that Bulletin and Yoshimi have both been bad Flaming Lips albums, please go grab a Creed CD and walk off the face of the earth. Thanks.

I was originally ready to submit the following review text:

<< My complaint with The Flaming Lips is identical to my complaint with, of all things, the Smashing Pumpkins: serious, impressive talent as composers and arrangers in the service of... nothing at all. I salute TFL's sprawling, surreal, kitchen-sink symphonies, but I wish they actually had something to say. The vaguely sci-fi, astroboy lyrics just don't live up to the musicianship. Only "The Spiderbite Song," which some other reviewers have taken as a upbeat ode to friendship, hints at something deeper and darker -- to me it reads more like a brazen and intriguing ode to neediness: after all, it equates the possibility of love with the possibility of death, and claims of both that it would have destroyed "me." Kudos, however, for being insanely listenable and working the word "vegetables" into the first line of a song -- and I thought Alannis Morissette stood atop that particular mountain for "antibiotics." Oh well, YOSHIMI is on its way already, maybe that will show me the light. >>

Then I realized, with help from the booklet art direction, that these songs actually represent a dialog -- between two people, or between the head and the heart I can't say -- and they're all strange metaphors for the aspirations and battlefields of love. Now that's intiguing, and now I'm impressed. (Guess that shoulda been clear by the note to track 6. Apparently I'm slower than I'd thought.)

One thing still bothers me, though: how do you "accidentally" touch your own head???

The greatest recording of the decade? Maybe EVER? It would be one thing if it was just the overzealous Amazon customers making such overblown testimonials to this record, but it's the reviewers too. It's frightening how bandwagonesque it's become to call the soft bulletin the "greatest CD of the 90s", or even the "greatest CD ever!".

Now I love the Flaming Lips, and this is not my favorite recording of theirs. I prefer Priest Driven Ambulance or even Clouds. However, this album is alternately trippy, dreamy, sometimes even beautiful. I love "Race", "Spark that bled" and "Disintegrate". I like a few others, but some songs, like "Gash", just turn me completely off.

It's definitely an original album, but I am amazed and disturbed that people seem to get caught up in the hype and try to agree and out-do each other with respect to who can give this album the greatest reccomendation. I listen to music with my own two ears, not anyone elses, and what I hear from the soft bulletin is a 3 (ok, 3-1/2) star recording.