The Definitive 1000 Songs Of All Time 1955 to 2005: Number 589

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Number 589 - Flaming Lips

Number 589

Flaming Lips

"Feeling Yourself Disintegrate"

(1999)

Genre:Alt Rock

So where does a band go after releasing the most defiantly experimental record of its career? If you're the Flaming Lips, you keep rushing headlong into the unknown -- The Soft Bulletin, their follow-up to the four-disc gambit Zaireeka, is in many ways their most daring work yet, a plaintively emotional, lushly symphonic pop masterpiece eons removed from the mind-warping noise of their past efforts. Though more conventional in concept and scope than Zaireeka, The Soft Bulletin clearly reflects its predecessor's expansive sonic palette. Its multidimensional sound is positively celestial, a shape-shifting pastiche of blissful melodies, heavenly harmonies, and orchestral flourishes; but for all its headphone-friendly innovations, the music is still amazingly accessible, never sacrificing popcraft in the name of radical experimentation. (Its aims are so perversely commercial, in fact, that hit R&B remixer Peter Mokran tinkered with the cuts "Race for the Prize" and "Waitin' for a Superman" in the hopes of earning mainstream radio attention.)

But what's most remarkable about The Soft Bulletin is its humanity -- these are Wayne Coyne's most personal and deeply felt songs, as well as the warmest and most giving. No longer hiding behind surreal vignettes about Jesus, zoo animals, and outer space, Coyne pours his heart and soul into each one of these tracks, poignantly exploring love, loss, and the fate of all mankind; highlights like "The Spiderbite Song" and "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" are so nakedly emotional and transcendently spiritual that it's impossible not to be moved by their beauty. There's no telling where the Lips will go from here, but it's almost beside the point -- not just the best album of 1999, The Soft Bulletin might be the best record of the entire decade. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide Waiwera

What does Rolling Stone think of Flaming Lips

Once you've labored in cult obscurity, fielded rumors that John Tesh wanted to cover one of your songs, appeared on Beverly Hills 90210, composed an orchestra for forty automobile tape decks and enjoyed a minuscule Top Forty blip, what do you do for a follow-up? The eccentric Oklahoma outfit Flaming Lips serenely release another baffling, winning, neopsychedelic recording. Densely textured, awkward but somehow melodic, The Soft Bulletin finds these pop oddballs with their poker-faced humor firmly intact -- "When you got that spider bite on your hand/I thought we would have to break up the band," sings Wayne Coyne in his strained Neil Young-style voice, referring to an accident that could only have happened to the Lips, and did. Their music isn't, how you say, universally accessible, and the weirdness gets same-y, but no one else has posited a parallel universe in which the Sixties and the Nineties exist simultaneously, allowing for a peculiarly convincing brand of monolithic robotic swirl. (RS 813)

For Neil Young see Number 938 & Number 677

Rolling Stone Top 500 Songs ranked this song at Number (Let us say this only once....) and the Album ranked at Number (Only WE have the authority to say its "Album of The Decade")

This song has a crowbarred rating of 72.4 out of 108 pts