The band had been inching away from the revved-up psych-pop formulation that yielded surprise hit вЂњShe DonвЂ™t Use JellyвЂќ ever since the commercial failure of 1995вЂ™s Clouds Taste Metallic (which may be the real best Flaming Lips album depending on your mood). Its brilliance might have caught people off guard, but it didnвЂ™t come out of nowhere. The Soft Bulletin is a world to be explored, and it has continued to beget new galaxies as fellow visionaries discover it. ItвЂ™s hard to imagine acts like Tame Impala and MGMT existing in their present form without this recordвЂ™s influence.

Among them are some of the most successful psych-pop crossover stars of our time. The version of the Flaming Lips we have today, the one that has long since calcified into a shtick? With Wayne Coyne in a suit playing ringleader for a fantastical circus, spewing blood or rolling atop his audience in a giant bubble while Steven Drozd leads the band through psychedelic symphonies? That began here in spectacular fashion, with a dozen tracks that rewired the Flaming Lips and, upon impact, rewired quite a few listenersвЂ™ brains too. What cannot be disputed is that The Soft Bulletin is the most pivotal release in the bandвЂ™s career, the one where they cemented their status as legends and established the archetype theyвЂ™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 LipsвЂ™ finest creative output, though with a discography as vast and varied as theirs youвЂ™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 todayвЂ™s teens make me feel like an ancient relic and albums released when I was their age are turning 20. On record theyвЂ™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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