
Rhythmic, piano-laden, exploding with intelligence and sonic texture, The Soft Bulletin, the band's ninth album, continues the trio's adventure into other-worldly pop.More than three years after the fact, Wayne Coyne can appreciate how 'wonderful' Flaming Lips' performance of The Soft Bulletin with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra was. The album is different and new, courageous and accomplished, as unique as ever and yet more listenable than ever. The Soft Bulletin is the most accessible album that psychedelic-noise-pop stalwarts The Flaming Lips have ever released. Capturing the band's performance of their landmark 1999 album at the famed Morrison, Colorado amphitheater in 2016, the album never. On Soft Bulletin Live at Red Rocks, the Flaming Lips bring together the open-air immediacy of an outdoor rock concert and the majesty of an orchestra - two things rarely heard together on the average live album.
Flaming Lips Soft Bulletin Orchestra Full Fruition On
He was growing up and away from the splenetic psychedelic freak-outs of earlier albums and emerging as a first-rate composer-perhaps the first alt-rock star to earn such status.Disco The Soft Bulletin: Live at Red Rocks (feat. That album, along with the Lips' Parking Lot Experiments, offered proof that Coyne wasn't playing by the same rules as everyone else. Anyone who had the gumption to actually listen to Zaireeka, a song cycle that could only be heard by playing four CDs at the exact same time on different stereos, knows that head Lip Wayne Coyne and his Oklahoma City brethren had it in them. The Flaming Lips' particular and peculiar genius comes to full fruition on the stupendous The Soft Bulletin. Rhythmic, piano-laden, exploding with intelligence and sonic texture, The Soft Bulletin. The album is different and new, courageous and accomplished, as unique as ever and yet more listenable than ever.
As with those albums, Bulletin shares a love of cosmic, vaguely psychedelic pop and a closet full of pet sounds. The ever-evolving psychedelic pop-rock group led by legendary front man Wayne Coyne will create an unmissable, moving, and magical experience.The Soft Bulletin is absolutely colossal, a testament to their position as the vanguard of a movement that includes Spiritualized's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs, and Olivia Tremor Control's Black Foliage. The Flaming Lips (Wayne Coyne, Steven Drozd, Michael Ivins, Derek Brown, Jake Ingalls, Matt Kirksey and Nicholas Ley) were accompanied by a 69-piece orchestra and 56-strong Chorus.The Flaming Lips will perform their iconic 1999 masterpiece The Soft Bulletin in its entirety, joined by the Oregon Symphony.
"A Spoonful Weighs a Ton" sounds like a collusion of Bach and Tricky. One imagines Coyne in front of a full orchestra, urging them to keep up as he sings, "Ooh, those bugs / buzzing 'round." on "Buggin." But the Lips orchestrated the entire album in their studio, sometimes manipulating more than 200 separate tracks to achieve Bulletin's vast symphonic excess. On top of it all, Coyne's sweet but ravaged voice yields tender lyrics that tag a catalog of Lips stalwarts, such as insects, spirituality, and superheroes. It's a cliff of sound, propelled by drummer Steven Drozd's tremendous pounding. The sound is massive and complex gongs, harps, grand piano, bells, pipe organ, strings, oboes, choral harmonies, and, strangely, very, very little guitar squall all merge into one wall-no, wall of sound doesn't do it justice. Although Bulletin steps back from Zaireeka's over-the-top indulgence, it manages to be symphonic, bombastic, outrageous, and damned catchy-while still oozing the band's unique weirdness.
If The Soft Bulletin is any indication at all, they can do anything they please. "The Gash" is just too singular to adequately describe.It'll be interesting to hear what the Lips do next. "The Spiderbite Song" is a shotgun wedding between a tender piano ballad and the industrial noise of things falling apart.
The album really sounds strange, weird, and that is because it is a melting pot of different styles of music both in form as in function. So has it happened with Soft Bulletin, by The Flaming Lips. Those albums had the virtue of turning me, after several attentive listenings, in a follower of each group. I only remember two other albums that caused me such a strong impression in their own field of music experimentation: Loveless, by My Bloody Valentine, and Lateralus, by Tool. -Tod NelsonLet me first confess that this is the first album of Flaming Lips that I have heard, and as many listeners have said, it is kind of hard to dig in it at a first listen I am one of those who thought at the first listening that he/she was hearing a piece of "idiotic" and "directionless" music.
I hope that someone in the near future will lay out the comparisons between the Soft Bulletin and Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, by the Beatles, Smile, by Brian Wilson, and Dark Side of the Moon, by Pink Floyd, among other historical albums. Sometimes the music suggest relaxation, sometimes induces to dance. And finally, the texture of the sound and the atmosphere of the music make you imagine sometimes a film of some sort, or imagine distant and strange environments. At the same time, the songs are highly melodic, harmonically dense, catchy and even very danceable at times, turning them into a part of a pop flavoured ouvre that can appeal to listeners not used to the complexities (and pretentions, some would argue) of some art prog rock music.

It is so packed with sounds that even after many listens, each play makes you listen again, as you realize how much is there that you hadn't caught before.The Soft Bulitan is a rock and roll album in the Beatles or Dylan sense. Every guitar strum has with it an ecchoing kettle drum, and a foot tap, and a sustained pull on a paino string, and a french horn buried just under the mix. There is not one second on this album that does not pack layers and layers of sound.


