Seven years, four albums: starting in 1992 with My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, up to Spiritualized's Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space in 1997, on to Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs of last year and now to this, The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips. It's a quartet of albums that perhaps represents everything you need to know (but were too damn indie to ask) about music and how it should it be played in the 1990s.
What distinguishes each one is not just that it is of its place and time, but that it is fearlessly modernist in a world that's gone retro-pastiche-post-modern crazy. While all four could be corralled into the "post-rock" stable, it's more a case of never mind the concept, feel the content.
That it's one Irish album, one British and two American means about as much as you want it to mean. Collectively, they all represent how music should sound in the 1990s in that they are all going up through the gears and are not, like Oasis et al, stuck in reverse. The last two albums are a curiosity in themselves. The Flaming Lips, like Mercury Rev a year previously, managed to take their foot off the psychedelic wah-wah pedal, repent of their Jesus and Mary Chain and Sonic Youth influences and begin to shape their melodies rather than bludgeon them with the wrong end of a Rickenbacker for the sake of an "alternative nation".
No longer deafening, it's now dazzling. Forget Pere Ubu, check out that Cole Porter dude. This is probably what they meant back in the days of trash chords and plaid shirts when the underground was supposed to go, live and direct on MTV, overground. Except that Pearl Jam and their whinging frat school just weren't worthy; and The Offspring and Green Day couldn't manage more than four chords between them (three of which belonged to Joe Strummer). What, then, are a band like The Flaming Lips - who previously couldn't trouble the top 100 of the album charts over an eight-album career, doing at the top of this year's musical heap with the simply stunning The Soft Bulletin? There are certainly no clues in their history: formed in Oklahoma in 1984 they were, for many a year, just another half-demented neo-psychedelic band who rejoiced in song titles like Talkin' Bout The Smiling Deathporn Immortality Blues, although early albums such as In A Priest Driven Ambulance (1990) did raise them above mere curiosity value. As their music suggested, they were big fans of LSD in those days, but now see the psychedelic trip as "interesting but overrated".
Much to everyone's bemusement, they were picked up by a major label (Warners) in 1991 and of their first four albums on the label, the only one to cause even the slightest commotion was Clouds Taste Metallic back in 1995, which contains the glorious song Guy Who Got A Headache And Accidentally Saved The World. They were last heard of two years ago when, in seemingly full-on Syd Barrett mode, they released an album called Zaireeka which came on four different CDs - which had to be played simultaneously on four different CD players. It was supposed to be a whole new way of creating sound, but instead almost became a whole new way of getting dropped from your record label. But now comes Soft Bulletin, which singer and main songwriter Wayne Coyne describes, accurately, as "a pile of unsynchronised music sounds to create a variety of moods with more emotionally-based songs". From the uplifting opener Race For The Prize (which, in typical Flaming Lips fashion, is about two scientists competing to find a cure for a fatal disease attacking humanity) to the sublimely sedate Waiting For Superman, never minding some remarkable instrumentals such as The Observer, this is stirring stuff.
Throughout, Wayne sings like a mix of Mercury Rev's Jonathan Donohue (Donohue used to be in the band) and Neil Young; the drummer sounds like he has graduated from the John Bonham school of hitting things, and you can hear the influences of the maverick genius, Todd Rundgren. This is big orchestral music with an early Pink Floyd sensibility, which has you reaching for unlikely words (for a rock band) like phantasmagorical.
"It's richer in love and mortality than anything we've done before," says Coyne, "I hear moments in other people's music that just crush me, movements and sounds that say something that could never be otherwise be said. I want to get as many of those movements on to my record as possible, but there's no path. We don't tend to get there by walking or flying; we get there by ambulance. It's all accidents. The more hazardous it is, the more exciting. I think even the failure of art is exciting." This is just the sort of music that you hoped would be produced in 1999: "I fear that by the time we get to the year 2000 the music scene will sound like 1979," says Coyne. `Whose fault is that? It's our fault if we can't put in some idea that is unique to our time. Let's do something so we're not just revelling in how great our record collection is . . . There is great urgency in there not to be just an accumulation of what we already know about music and culture."
The Soft Bulletin is on the Warner label.
