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The group's most gorgeously crafted album ever.
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Combines Beach Boys harmonies, Pink Floyd-influenced orchestral rock and the lonely-heart vocal style of such '70s icons as Big Star and Neil Young.
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A trip into the prettiest altered states the Lips have yet kissed.
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The Soft Bulletin is sparse and enchanted, like the band has awoken from a long dream spent spinning in outer space.
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Perhaps the most important album of the decade.
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An impossibly multi-tracked masterwork of excess, abrasion, and indefinable beauty.
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A joyous, celestial celebration of sound.
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A very good slice of experimental pop.
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Another baffling, winning, neopsychedelic recording.
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One of the Flaming Lips' most listenable records and another step up the ladder toward pop perfection.
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A vertiginous rainbow swirl that crams so many ideas into so many tight spaces that each track is like a perfectly rendered Joseph Cornell box.
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The Soft Bulletin echoes the oft-mimiced Smiley Smile by The Beach Boys, with its psychedelic wobbliness, songs-within-songs and airy termperament.
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This is one of those albums people are going to obsess over for many years to come.
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The Soft Bulletin posts several clunkers, a few throwbacks, yet manages to it finds its way into some genuinely new territory, and in its wake the Flaming Lips might just be poised to make a masterpiece.
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Not just the best album of 1999, The Soft Bulletin might be the best record of the entire decade.
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The Soft Bulletin provides an exquisite soundtrack to have blasting in the car at night.
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The Flaming Lips' particular and peculiar genius comes to full fruition on the stupendous The Soft Bulletin.
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Upon starting Soft Bulletin--you’re instantly whisked off into the universe the Flaming Lips have created. The musical journey that ensues is nothing short of imaginary genius--simple as.
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As if the Lips' perfect mix of pop and psychedelia wasn't enough, they write songs that are not only excellent but distinct as well.
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The Flaming Lips could've been forgiven for feeling usurped when their sister ship Mercury Rev steamed away with the garlands for Deserter's Songs last December, but in truth, both collectives are in competition with no-one but themselves and the gods.
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The Lips may have been inspired by the easy-listening craze, but the seeker's quality within their music tugs against that style's instinctive cheapening of sentiment.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 118 out of 132
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Mixed: 6 out of 132
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Negative: 8 out of 132
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Sep 3, 2011
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SamSOct 26, 2007
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Sep 7, 2010