My Top 10 Albums of the 90s: (3) The Soft Bulletin - The Flaming Lips

[This is the eighth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

The early story of the Flaming Lips was one of minimal creative success. Following the arrival of the brilliant drummer/guitarist Steven Drozd, though the band experienced a minor hit in 1993 with the goofy "She Don't Use Jelly," it nonetheless felt trapped by the idiosyncratic version of typical mid-90s alt-rock that defined its sound. Looking to branch out artistically, frontman Wayne Coyne conducted a number of "parking lot experiments," where he rounded up large crowds and played pieces of music – perfectly synchronized or otherwise – out of multiple boomboxes surrounding the fans. Along with the ascendancy of Drozd following the departure of guitarist Ronald Jones, these experiments led to 1996's fascinating Zaireeka, a 4-CD album that required the use of 4 stereos, ensuring that no two listens could be quite the same. The music on Zaireeka signified as dramatic an evolution in the band's identity as did the album's elaborate physical conceit. Lush arrangements, thunderous, intricate drum patterns, and experimentation with intense frequencies of sound resulted in intense, detailed soundscapes that lent the lyrics a weight that the band could never have achieved before. Coyne, too, was maturing rapidly: his songs came to deal more with serious explorations of life, love, and death (even as they retained their bizarrely quirky use of imagery and storytelling), and his singing fully embraced the strained upper-register style that would become his calling card and give his songs their emotional foundation. These changes would come together on 1999's The Soft Bulletin, with an execution and unity of vision that even the impressive strides forward on Zaireeka could never have anticipated. Opening with the sweeping Zaireeka­-era track "Race for the Prize" – which thankfully proved impossible to satisfactorily mix to four CDs – The Soft Bulletin flows effortlessly from track to track with songs of unyieldingly high quality. The eternal comparisons to Pet Sounds are fully warranted: both are symphonic, in sound and scale; both use everyday occurrences as launching points for emotional exploration (sailing and spider bites, for instance, respectively); and both have their soul centered squarely in the middle of the album, with the stunning "Waiting for a Superman" serving as The Soft Bulletin’s "God Only Knows." Yet the album has a sublime quality all its own, as beautiful as it ponders mortality on "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" as when it basks in the unfettered glow of love on "What Is the Light?" and "Buggin'." With their superb 2002 follow-up, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the Flaming Lips would complete one of the greatest back-to-back album sequences in the history of popular music. In the meantime, The Soft Bulletin marked the summation of a decade of remarkable growth and a note-perfect way to ring out the departing millennium.

[NOTE: Despite its relatively recent genesis, The Soft Bulletin has already seen many different releases on CD and LP, with varying tracklistings and runtimes. The CD included in the 5.1 Surround Sound release is by far the best and should be considered definitive.]