REVIEW: The Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin (Warner Brothers)
- Andrew Duncan
The Flaming Lips are artists who create songs like a painter slaps paint on a canvas, and The Soft Bulletin is the Monet of their career.
Clouds Taste Metallic may have been their most straightforward attempt at creating a pop album, but The Lips have always been extremists in a radio-friendly world. The event of the boom box concerts -- shows where a series of boom boxes were orchestrated by vocalist Wayne Coyne to play different sounds -- and Zaireeka -- a four-CD set made to play simultaneously -- the Oklahoma City natives have stepped over the edge in the alternative arena. Now, with The Soft Bulletin, the band has created their most experimental effort to date.
The CD begins like a picture-perfect day blooming with melodies and harmonies connected with sampled loops of string arrangements dancing about.
The band -- Coyne, Seven Drozd (drums, guitars and other stuff) and Michael Ivins (bass, guitars and vocals) -- enlisted producer Peter Mokran (R. Kelly, Michael Jackson and other R&B artists) to help give two of their songs, "Race For The Prize" and "Superman," a bigger sound.
What The Lips do best is twist simplistic elements into ingenious ideas. "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" demonstrates best, with a vocal drumbeat recorded twice and augmented only to subliminally transition into a real drumbeat.
Like mad scientists, the band concocts a complicated formula of psychedelic rock and '60s-style Euro-film score. Their songs can either be giddy -- "The Spiderbite Song," where Coyne tells the story of when Drozd suffered hand injuries from a spider bite -- or dramatic -- "The Observer" is a brief instrumental similar to an Italian tragedy.
Like a children's story, The Soft Bulletin is a great lyrical reverence to create innocence in sound.
