Verse and chorus follows and spirals and then suddenly we come to rest. We loop round again, circling the song like a fly circles a room looking for an exit. Fuzz bass, vocal harmonies, clattering and compressed Bonham-esque drums, harps and guitars take the listener on a rollercoaster ride of a chorus – scrap that, it’s like riding on the bag of a bug (getting into Coyne’s frame of thought is slightly easier than I realised)! The thunderous drum sound – a defining feature of The Soft Bulletin throughout and a gift from producer Dave Fridmann – cracks a snare waking up the world to drag it kicking into the next section. Again, it could only be the Flaming Lips that could engineer aural insects.Ĭoyne speaks up, crackling and straining to be heard above the sweet din: “All those bugs…” only to be helped out on the following line with a four, possibly five part harmony joyously adding “buzzing around your head” and then BAM! Sweet, tinkling pianos entwined with acoustic guitar arpeggios creep and crawl through the simplest of chord progressions while subtle drones of the deep counter swirling buzzes and bustling bleeps. We start, with bugs swarming round – or electronic sounds manipulated to sound like so. No simple moon, spoon, June rhyming couplet love songs to be found here – no siree. But this is The Flaming Lips, so it’s no surprise that its subject matter deals with… insects. Your standard just-over-three-minutes-in-length pop single if ever I heard one – particularly considering the complexity of the majority of the other songs. “Buggin'” is probably the most conventional song from the album. And nor is it the leading track and haymaker of a single “Race For The Prize”. Neither has the melodious yet in turns jarring “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton”. So the fatalistic sadness of “Waiting For A Superman” (Peter Mokran mix) hasn’t made my ink hit the paper… or rather the pixels hit the screen. But it’s a sunny day outside today (what is it with this album and sunshine?) and I’m feeling upbeat. So now, as ever I could have chosen any song from the album. Since then I have great memories of the album, which always seem to involve driving when the weather is fantastic (not a regular occurrence if you’ve ever visited North West England). Luckily for me (and unbelievably foolishly of her) she said I could have it as she never listened to it. Then, a girl I used to know owned it so I asked if I could borrow it. I knew a few of the songs, had liked what I heard and added it to my “Albums To Buy List” but for some reason had never picked it up whenever I visited a record store (remember those?). Joyous yet heartbreaking with Wayne Coyne’s cracked vocal punctuating each track lending a vulnerability only the Flaming Lips could provide on tracks with such preposterous titles as “What is the Light (An untested hypothesis suggesting that the chemical 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)”. The album is a gloriously layered, orchestral, sun-drenched slab of pure melody. An album where each song overflows with ideas, changes, kitchen sink style instrumentation, yet never loses its focus nor wanders from the strength of the songs at its core. That year, the album swept all aside to land awards and accolades and earned its reputation as the Pet Sounds of the 1990s. Then, in 1999 The Flaming Lips delivered one of the most listened to albums in my collection: The Soft Bulletin. And lest we forget the Zaireeka project – an album of four separate CDs designed to be played either simultaneously or in infinite random combinations. With titles such as “Rainin’ Babies”, “Talkin’ ‘Bout the Smiling Deathporn Immortality Blues (Everyone Wants to Live Forever)” and “She Don’t Use Jelly”, it’s amazing to think that a major label (Warner Brothers) funded these explorations for such little returns. Ever the peripheral figures on the music scene, the early Flaming Lips melded acid-induced freakouts with fuzz-pop garage stompers which never concealed their strange, warped and idiosyncratic sense of humour.
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