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The album was recorded and mixed during the same two-year sonic exploration that produced Zaireeka, a set of four CDs meant to be played simultaneously. The liner notes describe “What Is the Light?,” a spacey ballad set against a bass-drum beat, as “an untested hypothesis suggesting that the chemical (in our brains) 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.” On The Soft Bulletin, the Lips have found an aural equivalent for that vast, mysterious, and benevolent universe, their grand orchestral arrangements dwarfing Coyne’s frail, awkward tenor. A sense of millennial doom hangs over the new record–the melancholy “Waitin’ for a Superman” hints that no messiah could possibly bail us out of this mess–yet the lyrics also show a respect for sacrifice and the power of love that seems positively utopian. The Lips are probably still best known for “She Don’t Use Jelly,” their goofy mid-90s alternative-rock hit, but at least as far back as 1987, on the nuclear nightmare “One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning,” singer Wayne Coyne has been pondering the nature of the cosmos and the problem of evil.
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THE FLAMING LIPS SOFT BULLETIN NEW YEARS EVE FULL
The Soft Bulletin, the ninth full-length by Oklahoma City’s Flaming Lips, is an unqualified masterpiece, a record so full of beauty, wonder, and generosity of spirit that the Gideons should start putting it in hotel rooms.