The Soft Bulletin

Twelve tracks of sequence and two remixes, about fifty-nine minutes, on a spine the record requires. Race for the Prize must open: it states the subject, mortal people working against death, as a fanfare. Waitin’ for a Superman is the hinge and could sit nowhere else; Feeling Yourself Disintegrate is the compelled late summit, and Sleeping on the Roof the exhalation that must follow it. The Spiderbite Song and What Is the Light? carry turns the course needs. The test bites in three places, and they hold the figure: Buggin’ is a light summer song whose idea the record states better elsewhere, The Observer adds texture and no turn, and the two remixes restate the two strongest songs after the record has already ended on the roof.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: in the face of death, heroism is the ordinary labour of the people who stay, and love is no less real for being a chemical in a body inside an indifferent cosmos. Race for the Prize gives two scientists racing to a cure as “just humans”; Waitin’ for a Superman hands the weight to a hero who cannot lift it, so that the lifting falls to us; The Spiderbite Song is gratitude for friends who nearly died; What Is the Light? will not let the chemistry of love be diminished by the origin of the universe. Sound discloses as fully: a frail voice inside an enormous sound is the condition heard. Held below the bar because the statements are plain to the point of naivety, the meaning is felt more than articulated, and several songs repeat one thought.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Elevation is frequent and warm, wonder and grief together. Race for the Prize opens at height, a brass-like fanfare over drums the size of a hall. The Spark That Bled turns from hush to a rising chorus and then into a different song, and the turn is a lift. Waitin’ for a Superman climbs on a piano figure and a crashing kit to its question. Feeling Yourself Disintegrate is the summit: a wordless choir-like opening, then a song about dying sung as a lullaby. The Gash rises as a massed chant; A Spoonful Weighs a Ton and What Is the Light? rise too. Buggin’, The Observer and Suddenly Everything Has Changed stay near level. Seven or eight of twelve rise. Held from the top because much of the height is one gesture, the swell, repeated, and some is made by loudness.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Myth is built in one figure and evoked around it: the hero who fails. Waitin’ for a Superman takes the American superhero and makes him unequal to the weight, which passes to the ordinary person, and the record’s other figures arrange themselves around that inversion: the scientists of Race for the Prize as heroes who are “just humans”, the friends of The Spiderbite Song saved by luck, the army of The Gash going to a war of the mind. What Is the Light? sets a cosmogony inside a body. The particular stays real, a spider bite, a car, groceries put away, and the archetype rises from it. Held below the bar: the hero-pattern bears weight in one song and is atmosphere elsewhere, and the battle and the cosmogony are evoked, not built.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is the band’s own: fifteen years of noise-psychedelic guitar rock, ending in Clouds Taste Metallic (1995) and the four-disc experiment Zaireeka (1997), inside a 1990s indie rock that prized irony and the guitar. The turn is large, and made from far off. A guitar band, its lead guitarist gone, gives up the guitar as its centre for orchestral textures, enormous treated drums and keyboards, and gives up irony for open sincerity about death and love. The stake was real: a band of long standing on a major label, with a record of novelty and one hit, following an unplayable multi-disc set. What holds it at the bar and not above it: the path was proven, with Pet Sounds and Brian Wilson’s orchestral pop behind it.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The record’s claim is that the fragile human is held inside something vast, and its form is exactly that: a thin, cracking voice inside a wall of drums, keyboards and choir-like pads. Sung by a strong voice to a guitar band, these songs would lose their meaning, which is in the disproportion. The sequence is counted here, once: from public heroism, through private rescue in The Spiderbite Song and Waitin’ for a Superman, to dying in Feeling Yourself Disintegrate and rest on the roof, a course that matters. The Spark That Bled changes song in mid-track and enacts its title. Held from the top: most songs are verse and chorus inside the swell and would stand alone, the swell is one form applied twelve times, and the two remixes break the ending the sequence earns.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over twenty-seven years. The record has been performed whole by its makers, and its arrangements, how a band of three made an orchestral record from a small band’s means, are still discussed by musicians and producers. The yield in the record is mostly formal: the layers separate on return, and the drum treatments and the hidden lines of the arrangements surface on close hearing. The semantic yield is thinner. The words say what they mean at first hearing; the plainness is the point, and it does not deepen much on return. Part of the return is affection for a known sound. A formal depth over a plain text, kept open by the making more than by the words.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The field is the alternative and indie rock of the late 1990s. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that an indie band could be maximal, orchestral and sincere, without irony and without losing its audience, and it set a sound, Dave Fridmann’s huge, saturated drums under keyboards and voice, that a lineage of production carried forward. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: that drum sound passed into later records, the album is placed high whenever its decade is counted, and Race for the Prize and Waitin’ for a Superman stay in circulation. The reach is real and lies mostly among musicians and critics; the public reach of the album itself was modest, and the credit for the turn is shared with older orchestral pop. Held below the bar on that sharing.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Survival is weighed over twenty-seven years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and in print. Presence is continuous but narrower than the record’s standing among critics: Race for the Prize and Waitin’ for a Superman remain in circulation and in the band’s concerts, and the record is placed high whenever the decade is counted, yet the album was never widely heard by the general public, and its presence is concentrated among musicians and critics. That is the charged column. The fabric bears its moment: the mastering is loud and saturated to the point of audible distortion in places, a surface of its production era. A span of twenty-seven years with presence charged sets the figure.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, read to the anchors of the elder desks. The making is load-bearing in part. Steven Drozd’s arrangements build an orchestral record from a small band’s means: the piano figure and kit of Waitin’ for a Superman, the fanfare of Race for the Prize, the shifting sections of The Spark That Bled. Fridmann’s drum sound is a signature and carries the scale the record argues. The voice is placed exactly as fragile, which is the meaning. The faults fall across a real share of the record: the mastering clips and saturates, so that loud passages smear; Wayne Coyne’s pitch wanders beyond what the frailty requires; the swell is one device applied to most tracks; Buggin’ and The Observer are slight.

Score: 8.5 / 10

One law governs the record: a small human tenderness held up against death and an indifferent cosmos, in a sound that makes the cosmos audible. The two most distant elements obey it. The Gash, a martial massed chant about a fight for the mind, and Suddenly Everything Has Changed, a domestic scene sung softly, are the same law at two scales: the struggle, and the small act that makes the struggle bearable. What Is the Light? and The Spiderbite Song, cosmology and a friend’s injury, are joined by one claim, that the chemical and the cosmic do not cancel love. Held from the top: Buggin’, a light song about summer insects, strains the law, the remixes stand outside the sequence, and the palette is narrow, one sonic world throughout. Narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, in its frailty and its dying. Friendship and the household are held: friends nearly lost, groceries put away. The body is held as illness and injury. Science is present as labour against death in Race for the Prize, and the natural order and the cosmos as the record’s horizon, the light and the origin of the universe; the sacred is raised by the question of the light. One tender law and one voice join them. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve: the state, history and labour beyond the laboratory are absent, and most orders appear as a single image rather than as a structure held together.

Score: 7.7 / 10