The Soft Bulletin

"Like opening the gates of heaven and dancing with God". That's how one contemporary reviewer described The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin. Big words for a truly vast work. One which contemplates life's big questions without ever descending into self pity. As Coyne put it recently, the album 'is about despair, but there is none in it'.


Written after the death of Coyne's father and during multi instrumentalist wizard Stephen Drozd's heroin addiction, the album documented a period of personal tumult. It catapulted them from unsuccessful, weird, druggy experimentalists to very successful, weird, druggy experimentalists. Though, arguably as experimental as anything in the Lips' oeuvre, Bulletin was a smash hit. Perhaps because this was where Coyne stopped singing about giraffes and started singing about, well, life and stuff. The resultant album is one of the most powerful, cathartic, sad, joyous and plain beautiful I've ever heard.


Disillusioned with 'rock', and shunning guitars, Coyne and his herd of musical alchemists descended into the realm of disneyesque opera. Creating effects such as the loop of opener 'Race For The Prize' by, to put it simply, fucking with a tape machine. The accompanying visuals for this track of sped up marathon runners and big bang style explosions is a good entry into the thematic tenor of the record. Coyne takes the small facts of our own everyday lives-its tragedies and joys- and wraps them in music and images so grandiose and bombastic that it elevates them to the stratosphere. It could've so easily descended into farce but the carnivalesque feel to the album actually makes it more profound.


It becomes a celebration of life despite it's utter futility. The album exalts the human. The frailty and weakness implicit in simply being alive. Bulletin is that rare beast: a psychedelic album that is completely devoid of pretension and filler. It is concerned with rendering the quotidian in the iridescent beams of the ether. Death, love all the intractable problems of existence are raised and tackled with both the shimmering beauty of the arrangements and the earnest but never po-faced creak of Wayne Coyne's vocal chords. Instead of offering answers or strafing the issue through clever linguistic ploys, Coyne simply tells it like it is.
The tragic figure of superman in the song of the same name who is overwhelmed by 'heavy'ness, is as good an example as any of the child like simplicity of Coyne's compositions. Typical of the cartoony grandeur of the characters who populate Coyne's world- Superman is a bathetic conflation of lost hope, frailty and lack of belief in God- and the only consolation offered is a kind of communality- we're all in it together, so let's go down with a shout. As testified by the tendency of hardened Lips fans to break down during live versions of the song, Coyne stumbled upon a potent formula to connect with people. So much so that he tried to resurrect the song in the more obvious 'Do You Realize' a couple of years later. It's also easy to see the influence of Coyne's teary yet glass half full persona on later works such as Arcade Fire's  Funeral . 


To dwell on the lyrics unduly is to ignore that this is essentially an instrument led work. By that I mean that Coyne's euphoria and despair would be ridiculous separated from their majestic, lush orchestral background. Indeed, the guitar solo (yes, they sneaked them in occasionally) on Feeling yourself Discintegrate says as much about mortality as any words could do. Throughout the album Drozd's compositions are bold enough to grace a Broadway stage and melodic enough to be a smash hit. Whilst all the time the words and music compliment each other to almost preternatural degree. It was revealing to watch the Pitchfork documentary and hear how Drozd was dreading giving Coyne the music to Superman. Being afraid the dude would write a lyric about candy-floss eating robots or something. But no Coyne honoured the gravitas of the melody, and beautifully so.


"They're just humans with wives and children", Coyne declares with gusto during Race For The Prize, relishing the flawed in the perfection striving scientists. Extolling the Icarus like ambition not the achievement. 
Sometimes a piece of art has to be larger than life to do justice to the farcical magnitude of life itself. Instead of a call to arms or a howl of despair The Lips offer another way out of the life problem: to sing with arms aloft and lungs aloud despite it all. Never has failure sounded so triumphant.