The Soft Bulletin, by contrast, was a universally praised classic thatвЂ™s been feted with a symphonic live-album remount and a Pitchfork-produced documentary.

The dense and difficult Zaireeka was released in a limited edition (due to its bulky four-disc jewel-case packaging) and has never been made available for streaming or download. The two records represent the polar extremes of the LipsвЂ™ canon. Then, just two years later, the Lips distilled all that free-ranging exploration into the pristine orchestral rock of The Soft Bulletin. Released in 1997, Zaireeka was the play-at-home version of those site-specific events, presenting eight unwieldy songs spread over four CDs that were designed to be played simultaneously on four different players.

After their underperforming 1995 album Clouds Taste Metallic failed to yield another вЂњShe DonвЂ™t Use JellyвЂќ and guitarist Ronald Jones checked out, remaining members Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins, and Steven Drozd liberated themselves from the pressures of writing hits-and the creative limitations of being a guitar-rock band-by conducting various synchronized-tape experiments with fleets of car stereos and battalions of boomboxes.

There's no telling where the Lips will go from here, but it's almost beside the point - not just the best album of 1999, The Soft Bulletin might be the best record of the entire decade.Over the Flaming LipsвЂ™ four-decade career, there was no more crucial turning point than the period spanning 1996 to 1999, when the Oklahoma group narrowly escaped their imminent fate as alt-rock has-beens and transformed themselves into the megaphone-wielding pied pipers of the 21st-century festival circuit. No longer hiding behind surreal vignettes about Jesus, zoo animals, and outer space, Coyne pours his heart and soul into each one of these tracks, poignantly exploring love, loss, and the fate of all mankind highlights like 'The Spiderbite Song' and 'Feeling Yourself Disintegrate' are so nakedly emotional and transcendentally spiritual that it's impossible not to be moved by their beauty. (Its aims are so perversely commercial, in fact, that hit R&B remixer Peter Mokran tinkered with the cuts 'Race for the Prize' and 'Waitin' for a Superman' in the hopes of earning mainstream radio attention.) But what's most remarkable about The Soft Bulletin is its humanity - these are Wayne Coyne's most personal and deeply felt songs, as well as the warmest and most giving. Its multidimensional sound is positively celestial, a shape-shifting pastiche of blissful melodies, heavenly harmonies, and orchestral flourishes but for all its headphone-friendly innovations, the music is still amazingly accessible, never sacrificing popcraft in the name of radical experimentation. Though more conventional in concept and scope than Zaireeka, The Soft Bulletin clearly reflects its predecessor's expansive sonic palette. So where does a band go after releasing the most defiantly experimental record of its career? If you're the Flaming Lips, you keep rushing headlong into the unknown - The Soft Bulletin, their follow-up to the four-disc gambit Zaireeka, is in many ways their most daring work yet, a plaintively emotional, lushly symphonic pop masterpiece eons removed from the mind-warping noise of their past efforts.

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