'Soft Bulletin'

This Flaming Lips album was released in 1999, three years before their magnum opus, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.

And it is their ninth album. Yes, there are eight other Flaming Lips albums that I know next to nothing about. Yes, it's insane to me that a band could be so prolific in a genre of music that I enjoy and yet there's a lot I still don't know about them. It's almost like finding out a good friend as a second family in Topeka, Kan.

Soft Bulletin is melodic and good. I wouldn't say it's better than Yoshimi ..., but you could find a billion worse records in this world and most of them would be from 1999, a cesspool of music.

A few fun facts: The Lips recorded this album in the hippie commune of Cassadaga, New York where they'd record their next two albums and where other artists have gone. The album cover was taken in the 1960s for a TIME magazine article on LSD. It is a shot of Neal Cassady, the beat writer and bud of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.