Through this collection, we also get a clearer picture of all the fine-tuning that went into The Soft Bulletin’s HD vision. When freed of Zaireeka’s logistical demands, songs like “Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Despair” and “Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now)” not only measure up to anything on The Soft Bulletin, their gravitas and smog-cloud atmosphere also point the way to later dystopian triumphs like Embryonic and The Terror. For one, this is the only place where you can find traditional stereo mixes of five Zaireeka tracks, which confirm the album wasn’t just a huge sonic leap forward for the band, but a pivotal emotional breakthrough as well. While some of these recordings have since popped up as B-sides, compilation tracks, or bootlegs, The Soft Bulletin Companion’s reappearance-initially as a Record Store Day vinyl exclusive, now as a widely streamable set-restores a crucial chapter in Lips lore. The Soft Bulletin Companion was originally a limited-run promotional CD-R that featured alternate mixes, leftover tracks, and other oddities caught on tape between ’97 and ’99. But a newly unearthed compilation reminds us that these oppositional releases were actually products of the same recording sessions with producer Dave Fridmann, and proves the two records really weren’t so fundamentally different after all. The Soft Bulletin, by contrast, was a universally praised classic that’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 Lips’ 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 “She Don’t Use Jelly” 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. Over the Flaming Lips’ 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.
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