The Flaming Lips
The Soft Bulletin

THE REVIEW

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and then begins that wonderful song called "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate," that wonderful song that first seduced me, then forced me to listen, and finally broke my heart, cut my breath, kidnapped my brain. That wonderful song that, quite possibly, disintegrated me.
Only my ears, clung to the headphones, were saved. A song that many might find nothing special, but for me, it is one of the possible answers to the question: why do you love music?

"Feeling Yourself Disintegrate," at the very moment it hypnotized me, 3 years ago, managed to prevent me from any other physical or cerebral activity for days and days, like many other great songs. It reminds me, just to mention another one, "Under The Milky Way" by the Church... but that's another story.

The Soft Bulletin, released in '99, immediately lived in the shadow of this song, for me, even though it is entirely a masterpiece.
Listening to it is like watching landscapes lit up, full of life and color from a moving train.
Wayne Coyne's unmistakable voice flies over these fields with the lightness of a flock of swallows. It's a real voice, touching, often out of tune, as the Condor likes (who returned to fly with a double on Sunday 9/2).
And all the instruments seem to play in the same way, creating a perfect symbiosis, strings with basses, guitars with piano, keyboards, xylophone.

The Flaming Lips on this album (more than in the recent Yoshimi...) succeed in their intent to propose the most natural and spontaneous sound possible. A lo-fi sound, and bucolic melodies, but in my opinion, less cloying than those of Mercury Rev, with whom the Flaming Lips have much in common, starting with the producer, Dave Fridmann.

The songs have the power to buzz in the listener’s head for a long time, and I think of the deadly start with "Race For The Prize," or maybe "Waitin' For A Superman." Sometimes they let themselves go into childish spasms, which fall unexpectedly into our ears but caress them, because that bass, that guitar, that voice are magical, and always retain their timbre, so sweet and sensitive.
And even the reflective moments, the empty spaces - one of the album's prominent features - manage to be moving.

This is why the global music underbrush considers them a cult band.