This came out in 1999 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
When your last release was a mammoth, psychedelic opus covering four discs — and meant to be played simultaneously on four CD players — how do you go back to making a “normal” album? Well, if you’re visionary Oklahoma alt-rockers Flaming Lips, you don’t even try.
Although they’ve arguably scaled back technologically on The Soft Bulletin, artistically the disc picks up where 1997’s breathtaking Zaireeka left off, with the Lips tossing out the rock ’n’ roll rule book and going wherever the muse and the music leads them. Orchestral strings, choir-sized vocals, hallucinatory effects, fuzz-tone guitars and just about anything else you can conjure up all combine here into cosmic, acid-pop soundscapes that somehow manage to be challengingly avant-garde and addictively commercial simultaneously. And you only need on CD player to hear it.
