The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - 5 The Lips freak out Palming the classics Wayne Coyne and co. go wild over the course of two discs By JOSH BAYER Daily Music Editor In the words of Flaming Lips uber- man Wayne Coyne: "Somewhere along the way it occurred to me that ** we should do a dou- ble album ... Just The' this -idea that you Flaming Lips can weave a couple F of themes into there Embryonic' and you can sprawl Warner Bros, a little bit." Embry- onic sprawls a lot. It also meanders, spaces out and - occasionally - suck-e er punches you in the cerebellum. The record suffers from a clas- sic case of double-album syndrome. From a band that's been so chroni- cally consistent in its songwriting,' Embryonic is a disappointing mix of songs that are songs and songs that Hairiest exorcism ever. are ideas. The record is the "fear- less freaks" at their most mind-jar- Another momentum-killer is the ringly experimental, but much of the nearly six-minute "Evil," the album's experimentation here is fruitless, second track and first omen that this clogging up the album's flow with is going tobe a record with skippable whacked-out filler. songs. The track starts out somberly Embryonic is stocking-stuffed on sleepy synth drones, drifts into with "mood" pieces that sound like an equally sleep-deprived chorus, they should be 45-second interludes indulges in some squelchy bass puls- but are stretched out exhaustingly to ing and then repeats the same exdct the three-minute mark. "Virgo Self- process all over again. Coyne's vocals Esteem Broadcast" is like a five-min- are pretty watery here, both sonically ute sleep hypnosis tape for absurdists, and lyrically: "I wish I could go back with wildlife noises, space-opera ooh- / go back in time / But ni one ever ing and ahh-ing and some guy who really can / go back in time / Oh, I sounds like Dumbledore solemnly would have shown you /tthose people intoning "This is the beginning" over are evil / and they'll hurt you if they and over again. "Scorpio Sword" is can." While this sort of ethics-for- an endless build-up of monomaniacal dummies songwriting works when drum rolls and false-start guitars arti- the band is operating in fun mode, ficially resolved with the last-minute Embryonic's more "serious" vibe intervention of melodramatic strings makes Coyne's color-by-anumbers and harp trickling. sermonizing feel facile. The majority of the album's instru- Although the album's uncharac- mentals are like texturally rich sonic teristic shortage of saccharine hooks blueprints begging to be charmed (there's not one bona fide "pop song" into actual songs. Sure, they all sound on the whole record) is compensated pretty "trippy," but these extended for in adrenaline on the album's hard- atmospheric gags purae the album's er, groovier songs, too often does the momentum. band fall into the trap of vaguely mor- The other day I read James Joyce's short story "Araby" on my iPod Touch. The first time I read it, I was 15. I was ina high school English class taking in the words from the grimy printed page of a hand-me-down text- book - one with "J LOVES P" scrawled on the page ends. And now, as a post-teenager, I've taken it in again, this time in a cafe on the screen of a portable device. One of the main differenc- es? The printed page is bigger "WITNEy than the screen - on the iPod,P I am encouraged to take in W "Araby" in small gulps, a hundred or so words at a time, due to screen size and font size (the bigger it is, the less I squint, which is a good thing). On the page, however, my perspective is wider: I can see the printed landscape of the story unfolding, fore- seeing phrases like "I lingered before her stall" lying in the paragraph breaks ahead. This idea of certain technological mediums breaking things into smaller bits is intriguing to me - not just in the amount of text presented on something like an iPod or a Twitter feed, but in our conceptions of time being broken down into smaller and smaller portions. I noticed that, in the short minutes taken waiting in line at Cafe Ambrosia to order a medium Chai Bomb, I could quickly boot up my iPod Touch and check my e-mail (WiFi permitting) or, instead, read a "page" of "Araby" in its entirety. The idea of time management has changed, as a short period of time can now be given to what we'd like to call "productivity," or this constant imbibing of information in tiny sips from portable devices like Blackberries or iPhones. I recently talked to a friend of a friend, who mentioned that she got the newsflash of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize on her phone at around 6 a.m. the day of the announcement. In that usually groggy-eyed, hazy-minded, hallucinatory minute one takes to brush one's teeth in the morning, I presume she was catching up on current events that occurred between midnight and wakefulness. This idea of smaller, productive chunks of time is somethingthat can be applied directly to e-books themselves. This past weekend I attended the Future of the Book Symposium, which was hosted by the University's Clements Library, the U-M Special Libraries Association and the School of Information. It was at this conference that I came to see various panelists' perspectives on the life, or death, or neither, of books. Mary Sauer-Games, the vice president and head of Higher Education Publishing for Pro- Quest LLC (the online research-oriented database compilingvast quantities of scholarly informa- tion), brought up an interesting point during her lecture: E-books are, in fact, beingused differ- ently than paper books. The research she presented by the Joint Infor- mation Systems Committee, which is devoted to studying the effects and usage of the e-book, was somewhat expected from personal experience, but the numbers were still surprising. Based on surveys completed by 22,437 people between Jan. 2008 and summer 2009, of the 12,014 who did read e-books, 54.7 percent admitted that they "dipped in and out of several chapters" when they read the texts online. This means that more than half of those sur- veyed have been skimming e-books, which pres- ents some insight into the usage of the book itself: These digital books are not necessarily being read cover-to-cover (so to speak) for an immersive experience, but being used to provide an extrac- tive experience - one where readers use e-books to quickly find and collect information. It seems like even books themselves now are bending to our wills and our free time, providing us the resources we need when we need them. All of this is contrasted with the fact that, pre-Internet, one had to bend one's self (walking through the snow to the library) and one's time (writing away sev- E-books get skimmed, not devoured. eral hours of the weekend to stay there and study) to the gathering of information. So maybe e-books, for now, are fulfilling a dif- ferent utilitarian niche for book readers, provid- ing a subtle but noticeably different experience from the paper page. As with a lot of technologies, including blogs and Twitter, we have become accustomed to usingtechnology as a means of connecting us quickly with mass amounts of the information we want. But at times we care more for quantity of informationthan the depth of that information. Joyce's "Araby" still remains an immersive work of literature, even on my iPod at Cafe Ambrosia, with its vivid images of the fair and the cold autumn evening, but as an e-text, it was a world that filled in the gaps of my time, where the unfolding story was interrupted by a barista handing me a stout mug of spiced chal. Perhaps the role of technology today is to provide us with what we want quickly. And perhaps the paper book, in its antiquity, still carries connotations of a time where we would diligently set aside time to let the book take us to places, instead of the other way around. Pow tried to read James Joyce on a her Gameboy, but ended up catching a Pikachu. Congratulate her at poww@umich.edu. alizing lullabies. Breathy sing-a-long "If" and vocoder-addled robo-ballad "The Impulse" feel like auxiliary back- ing melodies compared to the band's signature symphonic harmonies. Still, there's something cohesive and brilliant lurking amid the pink- flamingoed folds ofEmbryonic's spotty indulgence. Somewhere in this mess is a fantastic 30-minute krautrock-funk fusion album. Demonically throbbing rhythm-fiestas like "Convinced of the Hex" and "The Sparrow Looks Up at the Machine" sound like Can exorcis- ing the Talking Heads at a cantina in hell. And yes, this is a good thing. Embryonic taps into a spiny, visceral darkness but muffles it in a heap of tie-dyed meandering. - A great double album is rarely cohesive - The White Album is little more than a sprawling anthology of five-star songs. But on Embryonic this sprawl often leaks from the arrange- ment of the songs to the songs them- selves. Still, there's enough prime psychedelia here for listeners to edit their own significantly slimmer cuts of what should have been. I BELIEVE IT WAS TIGGER WHO SAID, "THE WONDERFUL THING ABOUT DAILY ARTS IS DAILY ARTS IS A WONDERFUL THING." Write for Daily Arts. E-mail battlebots@umich.edu for an application, .1 Visit our booth at the Graduate School Fair to learn more about over 50 graduate programs in the arts, education, humanities, sciences, and Tuesdays Are South The Border CoronalSollModella/Pacifico Specials All Night $2.50 Tequila Sunrise & Vodka Drinks *25% Off M xiccsn Fare All With NO COVER 310 Me nscd St. -Tn O Orders 134.995.01110 -NexI in Ihs May nd rict Sitrulure H E. ' . Your Path 4f F Continues at Lehigh. The College of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University seeks graduate students who will contribute to a vibrant community of scholars and join us in exploring knowledge and practice through innovative research. 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