The Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin

I won't get too deep into how revolutionary or epic or overwhelmingly good this album is musically; that's territory that's been charted to excess by music criticism for five years now, a foregone conclusion akin to saying, "Hey, you know what? The Beatles wrote some pretty good songs." What I will talk about is how that monstrous sonic palette, the sheer experimentalism and redrawing of borders and symphonic scope of The Soft Bulletin, are not just there for their own sake; this wankery is all in the service of a greater goal, a desperate and tragically sincere attempt by Mssrs Coyne & Co. to evoke something emotionally, to tug at our heartstrings, to make us cry during a June sunset. Listening to this album, you know there's no shame in being wholly, unconditionally in love with anything or anyone, or with joy itself.

This revelation served me well when I first heard it five summers ago, fresh out of college, facing a chronic case of unemployability. I took a temp job at ACT, the corporation that makes the standardized test that every high schooler in the Midwest knows and loves and hates, and sat in their MCAT division for three weeks opening applications from aspiring medical students and alphabetizing them. That's all I did. That, and I listened to The Soft Bulletin almost constantly, pressing stop only when I wanted to hear The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, an album of similar poignancy and scope. The only things I really had to look forward to were the cute girl with her leg in a cast who sat across the room from me, and making futile attempts at reading Gravity's Rainbow during my lunch break. At night I would go home and work on the first Speed Of Sauce album in the unbearably hot attic apartment we'd converted into a home studio. We had to close all the windows and put mattresses against them so the neighbors wouldn't complain about the noise, and of course the feeble window air-conditioner had to be shut off so its humming wouldn't bleed onto the recording. That was the summer that the heat index in Iowa City remained at a strident 115 degrees for a good stretch in July. It was hell.

And all the while we were listening to albums like this one and making our own na�ve attempts at recreating certain aspects of its sound. I would play "The Gash" for Mark and say, "Here. Make my drums sound like this. On this song," and I'd prod poor Mark through hours of trial and error, having no idea what I was talking about: "No, not quite. Maybe more compression. They need to sound ... bigger." Never mind that we didn't have Dave Fridmann's budget, equipment, or acumen; Mark did come admirably close in a few places. If I wasn't enraptured by the sonic qualities of the album, I was daydreaming over MCAT applications, pining away during "What Is The Light?" for the girlfriend I�d left behind at college or making grandiose plans for my post-graduate career during �A Spoonful Weighs A Ton�. After five years, and the less-sprawling but just as sincere Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, and my own tenures at other shitty part-time jobs and in other well-meaning, doomed bands, this album still holds up. It's the new sincerity, buttressed by unrelenting walls of huge drums and synthetic orchestra, an aural onslaught belied by its own tenderness.

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