It's an incredibly simple, piano driven song held down by Drozd's eternally restless drums, featuring some of Wayne Coyne's most beautiful lyrics. Steve Drozd claims that when he heard the final mix for "Waitin' for a Superman," it brought tears to his eyes. "Suddenly Everything Has Changed" isn't quite a ballad, but it's also not on the same pop platform as "Buggin'" or "Race for the Prize." What we get instead is a strange, wistful song about mortality that brilliantly twists around tempos and emotions. Has there ever been a more exciting and definitive opening song than "Race for the Prize"? It introduces everything about the album that you've never heard anywhere else before: Steve Drozd's huge distorted drums, the heavenly synths, and Wayne Coyne's triumphant vocal melodies. Even the band realizes that it can't turn back, so they simply repeat the chorus until the song is finished. When the chorus to "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" finally hits about two minutes into the song, it suddenly becomes obvious that the entire album was basically a build-up to this one glorious moment. "The Spark That Bled" is the album's "Bohemian Rhapsody," a six-minute, multi-part epic that captures everything The Soft Bulletin has to offer: celestial production, sublime melodies, contemplative lyrics, and of course, moments of inspirational humanity. Though it's up for debate whether or not Coyne actually believed Drozd, the song's sweet, childlike nature never fails to leave me choked up. When Steve Drozd developed an infection through his heavy heroin use, he told Wayne Coyne that it was simply a spider bite, which inspired this beautiful song. If Wayne Coyne had a better singing voice, this song would have been everywhere. It's the album's best and most straightforward pop song, and the fact that it wasn't a huge hit is very disappointing. It is impossible to sing "Buggin'" without having a big, goofy smile across your face. It veers dangerously close to a Disney level of schmaltz and whimsy, but this optimism exactly why it's a brilliant, beautiful song. People coming in to The Soft Bulletin for the first time might find themselves turned off by "A Spoonful Weighs A Ton," as I was when I first heard the album six years ago. Like "The Observer," it's another sleepy, atmospheric instrumental, but after spending fifty minutes floating through the heavens with the other twelve songs, "Sleeping On The Roof" brilliantly brings us back down to a hot summer night on Earth, complete with chirping crickets. The Soft Bulletin closes out with "Sleeping On The Roof," which has a melody that Steve Drozd composed by writing random dots onto a music staff. Wayne Coyne and Steve Drozd have a knack for creating songs that are sonically challenging and progressive, but have melodies that sound like they've already existed for a century, like the ballad "What is the Light?" Though there are some undeniable similarities between this song and " target="_blank">Pink Floyd's "Vera," it's still one of the album's most traditionally beautiful songs. But then comes a classic moment of Wayne Coyne's uplifting romanticism: "Will the fight for our sanity be the fight of our lives?" This is the kind of music that makes living feel like a triumph. It's the aural equivalent of staring at a starry night sky, a beautifully atmospheric and subtle piece of music.įor the first two minutes of "The Gash," the song is almost too much for me, with all of the weird voices and group vocals and whatnot. The first of two instrumental tracks from The Soft Bulletin, "The Observer" can be heard as almost an intermission of sorts. It wasn't even included on the US edition, so it's definitely the album's most overlooked track. None of the remixes were considered for this ranking.)Įven the worst song on The Soft Bulletin is an immaculately produced pop gem (just listen to those huge, swirling drums), but "Slow Motion" is the only song on the album that doesn't completely fill my heart with majesty and wonder. (Note: Because there are a few different editions of the album, I'm basing this list off of the thirteen track vinyl edition. Here's my ranking of the album's thirteen songs, from weakest to best. Fifteen years ago today (June 22nd), the Flaming Lips released its masterpiece The Soft Bulletin in the US, an album which signaled the band's complete shift from acid punks to psychedelic pop geniuses.
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Brown, Eugenio Derbez, Tiffany Haddish, Danny McBride, Peter Dinkalge, Pete Davidson, Zach Woods, Dove Cameron, Maya Rudolph, and many more, the new animated movie is now playing in theaters everywhere. It’s a great thing to see a project as big as The Angry Birds Movie 2 taking on and saying something about modern issues, and not only is it getting an impressive response from critics, but audiences can now see the film for themselves.Īlso starring Josh Gad, Leslie Jones, Bill Hader, Awkwafina, Sterling K. And then, you know, a male character being celebrated for his 'EQ' - like for being in touch with his emotions, and her being in touch with her brain, and celebrate those things. Not to be too overly convenient, but it's kind of lovely to see a female character being celebrated for her IQ. This was something that Jason Sudeikis highlighted in his response, noting that it’s typical in Hollywood that the featured dynamic between the characters is switched. Working with Silver, Red has a fair number of good ideas, but his arc in the sequel is certainly more about conquering his aforementioned emotional issues. He sees an opportunity to reignite his public image when a neighboring island of war-hungry eagles begins launching assaults, but his head space is complicated. In that film, she is Chucks sister, a skilled engineer and a potential love interest for Red. That last bit very much sums up what Red is going through in The Angry Birds Movie 2, as he is very much driven by his emotionally-crippling anxiety that it won’t be long until his efforts in the war against the pigs will be forgotten, and that he will soon return to his sad life as a disgruntled nobody. Silver, a bird who first appeared in the game, went on to appear in the animated film The Angry Birds Movie 2, voiced by Rachel Bloom. And that's so cool! And I think, 'What a great influence for little boys to see a bird or a human getting in touch with his anger and showing what's behind that anger, which is a fear of abandonment.' I know that there will be little girls who see this character and it directly affects their lives and what they want to be when they grew up. Those are my two inspirations.Ĭontinuing, the actor acknowledged that these kinds of movies really can stay in the minds of a child, and for both boys and girls can change their outlook on life: It was Wednesday Addams, and Pippi Longstocking mainly. They were all characters I'd seen in movies. My imaginary friends were all people from pop culture. I remember being a kid, and you look for any female character that's kind of like you - and there are a lot more female characters now than when I was a kid. SW.WriteLine("pre") įinally when we are done, we get a byte array out of our MemoryStream, convert it to a big string of HTML, and return it to the caller. MemoryStream imgStream = new MemoryStream(img) īitmap b = (Bitmap)Image.FromStream(imgStream) If(img.Length >100000) return "Sorry,Image too big for demo!" Public static string ConvertImage( string imageUrl, int scale) Not only that, but it does not take a lot of extra HTML because you can do this as a tag style applied to a PRE tag at the very beginning, and everything inside your tags will sport your cool styling! So without further bloviating, let's take a look at the class, examine the code, and look at a live sample! If you get the adjustments right on the CSS letter-spacing, word-spacing and line-height attributes, you can get those "faux pixels" to really pack together and look like an actual photograph. So much so, that if we aren't careful we can make a sentence look like this! So what's the answer? Its CSS! CSS style directives give us extremely fine-grained control over things like letter and word spacing, as well as line spacing. The net result of all this is that you get your HTML rendering of the image, but it looks crappy and washed out because of all the whitespace between the faux pixels and between each faux "line" of pixels. Once you've done that you can either display a dot "." or a number corresponding in some way to the color, but you have still missed the mark - because the default rendering behavior of the browser is to have some spacing between letters, some additional value of spacing between words, and some default further value of spacing between lines. Since Hexadecimal color values give us a very large range that browsers are capable of rendering, that's not the issue. The key to the high - resolution part of it is something that a lot of programmers miss - you can only return the HTML equivalent of a pixel by its color.
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