The Soft Bulletin

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All the elements for all four CDs exist on the same piece of tape, and we could hear them all simultaneously, but it was just a jumble. But for a variety of reasons, once you break it out into the four CDs, or — more to the point — eight speakers, you could actually hear everything a lot more distinctly, it worked a lot better. The ideas do all work simultaneously, but not when they're all coming from the same source. It's too jumbled that way. Once you've identified all the parts, then you can really hear the ridiculous whole that it is. If in 2002 The Flaming Lips were a mainstream band, it didn’t last. In truth, they didn’t really try to make it last: their subsequent albums became more and more experimental – 2013’s post-divorce album The Terror was particularly challenging. That changed with 2020’s brilliant American Head, a melodic record to stand up against The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi. “We secretly say the same thing,” he says of the album. “But the truth is to make records like that takes a toll on people. They’re just too intense. So for a while we thought let’s just make some weird records that don’t have to be better than Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and don’t have to be the new great thing.”

Would he write a song with AI? “Um, probably not. Just because, we like writing songs. That’s part of the thrill of it. But I’m not opposed to it. I’ve never cared how you can arrive at your music. But there’s a lot of stuff that the robots can’t do for you. At some point in civilization, it must have seemed very advanced for someone to have paint and paintbrushes and canvases. But it doesn’t mean that everybody is a great painter.” Wayne Coyne: ‘I’ve never cared how you can arrive at your music’ (Photo: Press) Dbx 165 compressor, 160A compressor/limiters (x3), 166 dynamics processor, 172 stereo gates (x2), 119 compressor/expander. The singing, while not technically great in a traditional sense, is certainly very emotional and amplifies the music to aural soundscape - pure feeling. (Neil Young is probably the closest voice comparison.)Make no mistake: The Flaming Lips were weird. And now they’d proven that they were capable of sonic brilliance, a revelation to the boy-band-clogged music world of 1999. The Flaming Lips, thanks to the record that Wayne Coyne thought no one would even be interested in, had finally arrived. DeRogatis remembers, now 20 years later: PHASE TWO is when they decided "well we better write some tunes", recruited long-time producer Dave Fridmann to the fold and introduced new members drummer Nathan Roberts and future Mercury-Revver Jonathon Donahue, who created walls of guitar noise. They gained critical acclaim and spent an incredible amount of money dropping guitars into toilets. I was confused. and today I gave a full listen to this edition and concluded that it is not only a remastered but also the remixed. But there’s no better measure of the Lips’ late-’90s zenith than the stellar songs that never found a proper home. These include “The Captain,” arguably the most over-the-top gesture from a period of over-the-top gestures. In stark contrast to The Soft Bulletin’s serious tone, the song’s snowballing orchestration exudes an anarchic joy, like riding a rollercoaster that’s just tipped over its peak into a never-ending free-fall. And then there’s the divine “Satellite of You,” a sweeping serenade that could be the closing-credits theme of a Hollywood musical circa 1945—or a last-call standard at a karaoke bar circa 2045. It’s quintessential Lips, rife with down-home sentiments expressed in far-out imagery. However, for the Lips of the late ’90s, such space-age love songs were less the product of an overactive imagination than a simple reflection of the rarefied cruising altitude they occupied at the time. Now that billionaires are spending the equivalent of a small country’s GDP to enjoy a few minutes in suborbital space, The Soft Bulletin Companion offers a much more cost-effective and environmentally friendly way to experience that fleeting, zero-gravity sensation of floating at the top of the world. This is a very Coyne-ian way of seeing things. He tells me he isn’t a great musician – “Steven [Drodz, the band’s long-time multi-instrumentalist] is the level of a Miles Davis… embarrassingly I don’t even know the chords to ‘Do You Realize??’” – but his big thinking and idealist adventure has elevated The Flaming Lips into singular terrain, equally brilliant and bonkers, where the surreal meets the existential.

The album was considered to mark a change in the course for the band, with more traditional catchy melodies, accessible-sounding music (their previous album Zaireeka was a quadruple album of experimental sounds meant to be played on four separate stereo systems simultaneously), and more serious and thoughtful lyrics. [8] Pattison, Louis (June 25, 2011). "The beatnik and the 'Bulletin: The Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin sleeve". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved October 16, 2019.Science Hero: "Race for the Prize" being about Scientists racing to create a cure, knowing the risk that it could kill them.