What cannot be disputed is that The Soft Bulletin is the most pivotal release in the band’s career, the one where they cemented their status as legends and established the archetype they’ve been tweaking ever since. (It was released on 5/17/99 in the UK before coming out in the US the following month.) Hailed as a masterpiece upon arrival, the album is still arguably the Lips’ finest creative output, though with a discography as vast and varied as theirs you’ll never have complete consensus on that. One of those albums is The Soft Bulletin, which completes its second decade today. They formed the year I was born, and I am now halfway through my thirties - old enough that today’s teens make me feel like an ancient relic and albums released when I was their age are turning 20. On record they’ve been skuzzy noise-bombers, fuzz-pop cartoon characters, experimental stunt artists, digital folk-pop anthem-slingers, and tripped-out paranoiacs. They ushered Miley Cyrus through the weirdest phase of her public identity crisis. They were contemporaneous with both 90210, on which they memorably guested, and The O.C., which fomented the Bush-era indie boom they rode to festival ubiquity. They were labelmates with Fear, Wipers, and the Dead Milkmen and were three albums deep by the time Nirvana released Bleach. The Flaming Lips have survived and evolved through an astonishing number of indie-rock life cycles.
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