The album is a gloriously layered, orchestral, sun-drenched slab of pure melody. An album where each song overflows with ideas, changes, kitchen sink style instrumentation, yet never loses its focus nor wanders from the strength of the songs at its core.
That year, the album swept all aside to land awards and accolades and earned its reputation as the Pet Sounds of the 1990s. Then, in 1999 The Flaming Lips delivered one of the most listened to albums in my collection: The Soft Bulletin. And lest we forget the Zaireeka project – an album of four separate CDs designed to be played either simultaneously or in infinite random combinations.
With titles such as “Rainin’ Babies”, “Talkin’ ‘Bout the Smiling Deathporn Immortality Blues (Everyone Wants to Live Forever)” and “She Don’t Use Jelly”, it’s amazing to think that a major label (Warner Brothers) funded these explorations for such little returns. That running order was never on CD, although a re-shuffled version is on the corrected 2005 CD which came with the 5.1 DVD.Ever the peripheral figures on the music scene, the early Flaming Lips melded acid-induced freakouts with fuzz-pop garage stompers which never concealed their strange, warped and idiosyncratic sense of humour. So, if I wanted this on LP, this is the one I'd go for, personally.Īll LP editions have the same 13-track, non-remixed running order. There's no fixing the raw, distorted sound of this album - Dave Fridmann does not make "nice" mixes - but Chris Bellman is one of the engineers I trust implicitly to deliver a listenable product. The LP got reissued in 2011 - I believe this was remastered by Chris Bellman, and for that reason is most likely the one you want. "Satellite Of You", I believe, has only appeared on this CD and the aforementioned Soft Bulletin Companion. The first two of those appeared on the CD edition of Greatest Hits Volume 1 in 2018. There exists an LP from 2009 that included a three-track CD with the outtakes "The Captain", "1000 Foot Hands", and "Satellite Of You".
Sadly, that set went out of print quickly anyway and is now around $50. Michael Ivins actually hand-wrote apology letters to buyers who received the "new old" CD, which was mailed along with the correct replacement disc. I don't know how this mistake got made, but it did. Now, to compound the confusion tenfold, initial copies of that set shipped with a disc that had the 2005 artwork but actually used the 1999 US audio - right down to being a HDCD. Puzzling - but it has all the songs, in their original mixes. This contained all 13 tracks from the LP release (no Mokran remixes, both "Slow Motion" and "Spiderbite"), although this one used the UK CD track list with "Spiderbite" and "Buggin'" tacked on to the end - despite only being released in the US. In 2005, the CD/DVD set The Soft Bulletin 5.1 was released with a CD. It used the US running order with "Slow Motion" inserted before "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate". It was the first release that collected all thirteen tracks from the two versions in one place (excluding the remixes). The original double-LP (from 2002, I think?) had all three original mixes, including "Buggin'", and no Mokran remixes. Those are very rare, command prices of $100 on average, and also reportedly fail over time. The original mix of "Buggin'" initially only appeared on the promo CD-R The Soft Bulletin Companion. This included the original mixes AND Mokran remixes of "Race For The Prize" and "Waitin' For A Superman", and ONLY the Mokran remix of "Buggin'". So, basically, the difference was "The Spiderbite Song" in the US and "Slow Motion" in the UK - the other 13 tracks are the same between the two, just in a slightly different order. All three Mokran remixes, including "Buggin'", appear at the end of the disc as bonus tracks. The UK CD had the original mixes of "Race" and "Superman" in the album proper (which includes "Slow Motion" as track 4), but omitted "The Spiderbite Song". The US CD had the remixes of "Race For The Prize" and "Buggin'" in the album running order, with the original mix of "Race For The Prize" and the remix of "Waitin' For A Superman" tacked on to the end.
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