The Books: The Way Out

THE BOOKS: THE WAY OUT (2010)

1) Group Autogenics I; 2) IDKT; 3) I Didn't Know That; 4) A Cold Freezin' Night; 5) Beautiful People; 6) I Am Who I Am; 7) Chain Of Missing Links; 8) All You Need Is A Wall; 9) Thirty Incoming; 10) A Wonderful Phrase By Gandhi; 11) We Bought The Flood; 12) The Story Of Hip Hop; 13) Free Translator; 14) Group Autogenics II.

Question: so why exactly did The Books break up? Answer: why, cuz the darn kids just don't read 'em no more these days! In this sad, illiterate age, plagued by free porn and Angry Birds...

...oops, sorry, wrong platform. The correct answer, of course, is: because so few people really cared if they lived or died that they preferred to die. For publicity's sake, I assume. «The Books broke up today». «What are you talking about? I only just finished rearranging the shelves». «No, apparently there was a whole band out there, called The Books, and they just broke up.» «Whoah, you don't say? A band called The Books? Why didn't anybody tell me? What's their game? Where can I buy their records? Do they offer a last minute garage sale? Is the fan club offering T-shirts for free?»

Not sure about T-shirts, but at least the band went out with its most transparently «musical» al­bum ever. Ironically, it is also their one record that is the least dependent on their traditional brands of instrumentation. Most of the backing tracks are either electronic or R'n'B-ish, or both, with the emphasis no longer on guitar and cello. This is not necessarily a plus in itself, but it makes the record more dynamic and jerky, so at the very least it is not that easy to fall asleep to the individual tracks.

Moving on, the album, for the first time ever, somehow tries to explain itself to the befuddled lis­tener. "Hello, greetings and welcome. Welcome to a new beginning, for this tape will serve you as a new beginning... On this recording, music specifically created for its pleasurable effects upon your mind, body and emotions is mixed with a warm orange colored liquid. Your body is now a glass container". If you have already signed a written consent allowing your body to be treated as a glass container, who knows? — your mind, body and emotions might even consider The Way Out an introspective masterpiece.

Or «outrospective», whatever. The herky-jerky nature of these tunes produces a paranoid impres­sion, which is way better than a lethargic impression. ʽI Didn't Know Thatʼ sounds like a shred­ded and recycled hip-hop (or would that be trip-hop?) track with a free jazz flavor for good mea­sure. ʽA Cold Freezin' Nightʼ features a little boy threatening to blow your brains out to the mer­ry sounds of something in between a robotic electro-funk pattern and a video game soundtrack. ʽI Am Who I Amʼ tips its hat to industrial metal (soft, though) as the protagonist asserts his identity ("I will be who I am and what I am"). And so on — do I really need to go through all the tracks?

Actually, a couple of the tracks almost work as actual songs. ʽAll You Need Is A Wallʼ is a rare spot of quiet acoustic meditation and falsetto vocal harmonies; and ʽFree Translatorʼ is an acous­tic folk composition, plain and simple. Neither of the tunes is particularly memorable or original, but at least The Books leave you unable to say: «These guys never made an actual song in their entire life». Although, come to think of it, it would sound cool, especially considering that they are much better at collages anyway.

In the end, I would probably have given the whole thing the usual negative assessment, if it weren't for ʽThe Story Of Hip-Hopʼ, a track that lambasts the genre in the subtlest way possible — as actual hip-hop samples are mixed in with a steadier rhythm track, «disrupting the flow» of the whole thing every several seconds, someone narrates «the story of Hip-Hop» as an animate character, including smart observations about the latter, such as "He never rests. He beats and whirrs and whirrs so fast that you can't tell what he looks like". And the moral at the end: "Now you see the trouble little Hip Hop got into. It was all because he didn't look where he hopped..." Hey, could I take credit for that? Guess not. Too bad.

So, The Way Out is not a particularly bad way out for these guys. If their purpose in art was to confuse and derail, I must say this is the only record in the catalog that seems to me to have hit at least somewhere near that mark. Occasionally intriguing, occasionally funny, rarely boring, fea­turing ʽA Wonderful Phrase By Gandhiʼ, and lots and lots and lots of «original» text that I very much want to see as a parody on spiritual sermons than the real thing (ʽChain Of Missing Linksʼ is pretty much the apogee here). It's okay. I just hope these guys never come together again. Out is out, after all. It isn't nice to cheat.

The Books: Music For A French Elevator

THE BOOKS: MUSIC FOR A FRENCH ELEVATOR (2006)

1) Fralité; 2) Egaberté; 3) Liternité; 4) It's Musiiiiiiic!; 5) The Joy Of Nature; 6) Meditation Outtakes; 7) A Long Villainous Sequence; 8) Millions Of Millions; 9) Of The Word God; 10) Ghost Train Digest; 11) You'll Never Be Alone; 12) Three Day Night; 13) Ah..., I See.

Okay, factual foundation first. This is a very brief (barely 15 minutes in length) EP-size release, whose full title is really Music For A French Elevator And Other Short Format Oddities By The Books, but titles of such length do not look too good in all caps. The «French Elevator» seg­ment actually only covers the first four tracks, which were indeed played in a French elevator installed in the Ministry of Culture in Paris for people visiting a special modern art and sound in­stallation in 2004. The other tracks just pad out the «album» with an extra selection of samples from The Books' archives. There is no «music» as such on them — just samples, most of them spoken (or, at most, bleated, bellowed, or whispered).

Now the evaluation. As it is, it happens to be my favorite Books album. First of all, fifteen minu­tes of Books per session is just about all I can stand. Second, the goddamn honesty. This time around, if you disregard the word Music in the title, there is really no pretense at all that they may be doing something other than mocking your brains out. What happens here is like... well, a little bit like a Terry Gilliam animation sequence with a broken video cable. It does not make much sense, and it is completely stupid from a rational point of view, but if it somehow hits that one right spot that is located God knows where — it's unforgettable.

The «Elevator» tracks, instead of focusing on The Books' usual acoustic guitar and cello (a little bit is still available on ʽFralitéʼ), bring in some lightweight jazz piano (ʽEgabertéʼ) or free-form jazz (ʽLibernitéʼ) that go well with some French fries, er, French spoken samples, and bring the absurdism to its peak by randomly remixing the initial syllables of the song titles. The resulting atmosphere is proverbially nutty, but also uplifting and full of metaphorical sunshine. And since the longest of these tracks clocks in at 1:21, the experience never drags.

The rest... weird it may sound, but it seems as if I really like the band's samples more when they are unhindered by all the diddling. For one thing, it helps us see that they are not simply incorpo­rating random stuff from their libraries, but spend a lot of time editing it. ʽGhost Train Digestʼ, for instance, is really a condensed version of an old British movie where they take away all actual content and leave in most of the "God gracious!...", "oh dear oh dear...", "sorry" and other idio­matic stuff. On ʽMillions Of Millionsʼ, a preoccupied female is counting out money. ʽMeditation Outtakesʼ is one minute of several people spelling out the word «meditation». ʽA Long Villainous Sequenceʼ is thirty-five seconds of evil cackling and grunting. ʽThe Joy Of Natureʼ is a bunch of people trying to sound like farm animals. And so on.

Since you never really know what to expect — at the very least, you may be almost sure that the next snippet is not going to be a boring minimalistic guitar/cello duet — the sequencing is thrill­ing, funny, and sometimes even thought-provoking. (And ʽGhost Trainʼ is a good vehicle to prac­tice your British pronunciation). Which, logically, brings me to my final point: it might have been a much better idea, given The Books' technical efficiency, if they had always separated their mu­sic from their samples. They are good musicians and clever splicers, but their regular albums do not really let us see the former and always obscure the latter. Here at least, for fifteen minutes, you can enjoy «just the splicing». Believe me, there's more to splicing than life.

The Books: Lost And Safe

THE BOOKS: LOST AND SAFE (2005)

1) A Little Longing Goes Away; 2) Be Good To Them Always; 3) Vogt Dig For Kloppervok; 4) Smells Like Content; 5) It Never Changes To Stop; 6) An Animated Description Of Mr. Maps; 7) Venice; 8) None But Shining Hours; 9) If Not Now, Whenever; 10) An Owl With Knees; 11) Twelve Fold Chain.

You'd think that, with this clear propensity for «pushing boundaries», The Books would eventual­ly start advancing beyond the format of their first album. For most of their predecessors this was, after all, inevitable. From the nightmarish industrial clang of Einstürzende Neubauten to the psy­chedelic kindergarten of The Animal Collective, they were all moving somewhere. But apparent­ly, that is exactly what Zammuto and de Jong are the most afraid of — that trying to expand their sound and vision will make their «art» more accessible and, consequently, dilute the «impor­tance» of their revolutionary contributions.

Which is certainly correct to an extent: speaking of Animal Collective, now that the world has shed a tear over Merriweather Post Pavillion, how many people are going to remember this band through their first batch of far less accessible, «anti-musical» records? Even despite the fact that, in sheer objective terms, they may have been far more «innovative» per se. Thus, it seems that The Books are willing to lock themselves in this curious state of «perpetual revolution» — not a progressive series of revolutions replacing one another, more like the same group of Bol­sheviks running up the steps of the Winter Palace in constant replay mode.

The third album is a little bit longer, a tiny bit more diverse in terms of selection of basic «melo­dies», and actually features a large amount of vocal work by the band members themselves — sometimes going as far as real singing, usually in a dreary lethargic mode. That's about as far as they allow themselves to go. As for the samples, these now include occasional poetry readings (e. g. from W. H. Auden and «Jabberwocky»), along with the usual obscure movie quotations and bits of street dialog, describing the details of which is excruciatingly boring, and decoding the reasons of inclusion for which is impossible without performing brain surgery on the creators.

You'd think that, perhaps, including a larger proportion of vocals would push these tracks closer in the direction of real songs, but it does not. The minimalistic instrumentation, the chop-and-pa­ste computer effects, the lulling or electronically treated original voices, and the extraneous sam­ples are still interwoven in «art-performance» fashion, so there is no threat of losing the band's precious integrity. In fact, I didn't even notice the change upon first listen — so seamlessly do Zammuto's and de Jong's voices flow into their sample database. I suppose that might be checked as a positive accomplishment.

As a curious exception, I'd list ʽIt Never Changes To Stopʼ, the best thing about which is not the "I don't want to hear any more talking, any more moving about" sample part grumbled out by a see­mingly insecure disciplinarian, but rather an excellent overdubbed cello part that is as much Wagner as it is ʽI Am The Walrusʼ. Its very presence makes the sound louder and fatter than just about everything else on here, and teasingly proves that these guys can make actual music when they feel like it. They just don't, most of the time.

The bottomline turns out to be the same as usual. If you are sleeping, Lost And Safe may wake you up — slim chances, though, because it won't wake you up by itself: you'll have to find it first, meaning that only authentic somnambulists are eligible. If you consider yourself wide awake, I fail to see any potential emotional or intellectual stimulation here that could be genuine. Just one more hollow attempt at breeding a new cultural stimulus that is only alive as long as there is a firm feeding hand to breed it. Sure ain't my hand, though — my hands go thumbs down!

Check "Lost And Safe" (CD) on Amazon

The Books: The Lemon Of Pink

THE BOOKS: THE LEMON OF PINK (2003)

1) The Lemon Of Pink; 2) The Lemon Of Pink; 3) Tokyo; 4) Bonanza; 5) S Is For Evrysing; 6) Explanation Mark; 7) There Is No There; 8) Take Time; 9) Don't Even Sing About It; 10) The Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice; 11) A True Story Of A Story Of True Love; 12) That Right Ain't Shit; 13) PS.

Hello and welcome to today's edition of «No Bull Session With Big Daddy». In the news: The Books release a follow-up to their critically appraised debut, Thought For Food. Called The Lemon Of Pink, it is one minute shorter, but one track longer than its predecessor, and continues in the same direction. This makes it, once more, an excellent target for our program.

A lot of reviews and evaluations of the album use different words to paraphrase more or less the same conclusion: «a chaotic jumble that should be a complete wreck, but somehow, for some rea­son, it works». Each time I read something of the kind, I want to turn into a little tick and crawl inside that particular person's ear — no, not to eat his brains out (although that might be an op­tion), but simply to witness his true reaction to a Books album. Because the nagging question is: what works? What kind of gold mine are these guys working on that remains inaccessible to us outsiders?.. Could you be more specific? In fact, could you be more specific?

That said, let us be just. The Lemon Of Pink is a bit less extremist and a bit more musical than Thought For Food. The samples are still at the forefront of everything, but there are now tracks like ʽTokyoʼ, where an actual acoustic melody — and a pretty one, too — runs over its entire length, while Japanese stewardesses welcome you on the flight and off it. The main theme of ʽTake Timeʼ may even be memorable, with the valuable help of the pendulum chorus ("take – time, take – time..."). And there are bits of impressive acoustic playing scattered here and there all over the place, particularly on the second half of the album.

This all makes The Lemon Of Pink sound like a rather vapid, distraught jam session played by a couple of professional musicians that just got together to fight boredom on a lazy, hot summer day. Pile some speech samples on top of it, and whoops, you got yourself an art statement. Take away the samples, and you get back your lazy distraught session. I just keep vacillating between rati­onal hatred for the former and friendly indifference towards the latter.

The little speech-filled links are friendlier and funnier this time, though. ʽBonanzaʼ is a bunch of chopped up, mumbled phrases in an unrecognizable language (Dutch?), recited by a toothless old man; ʽExplanation Markʼ sounds like several over-imposed phonetic lessons; and ʽPSʼ finishes the album with a recording of several people preparing to start something potentially important, but always failing due to uncontrollable giggle attacks. While it's all silly, it at least sounds frie­ndly and even «cute», which might be a starting point for liking the whole thing.

Alas, even if the record succeeds in not generally breeding negative emotions, it still never gets anywhere beyond «cuddly». Tracks like ʽThe Futureʼ and a few others occasionally sound close to The Beta Band — lulling, melancholic singing to folksy acoustic patterns that may, at any time, be interrupted by a heavy whack on the head with a frying-pan or your local rose-colored alien friend whizzing by in his flying saucer. But the Betas had the will to transform these psycho-folk vibes into actual songs, whereas the Books seem determined to put a totalitarian stop to these vile, commercial, intellectually insulting cravings.

With ʽTake Timeʼ and ʽTokyoʼ, their noble goal is almost ruined, because there are two or three things I still manage to remember about these tracks. Elsewhere, they are more successful. But if you are into The Books at all, you should be into hardcore — compared to Thought For Food, The Lemon Of Pink is a fucking sellout. As a pleasant collection of songs, it fails; as an artistic statement, it adds little to its predecessor; as a user-friendly sonic environment celebrating the simple joys of Planet Earth, it probably works best when your name is Major Tom, and you can­not hear me. Thumbs down either way.

Check "The Lemon Of Pink" (CD) on Amazon

The Books: Thought For Food

THE BOOKS: THOUGHT FOR FOOD (2002)

1) Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again; 2) Read, Eat, Sleep; 3) All Bad Ends All; 4) Contempt; 5) All Our Base Are Belong To Them; 6) Thankyoubranch; 7) Motherless Bastard; 8) Mikey Bass; 9) Excess Stra­uss­ess; 10) Getting The Done Job; 11) A Dead Fish Gains The Power Of Observation; 12) Deafkids.

As a friendly disclaimer, I would just like to remind the reader of a strict «no bull» policy that is observed in these reviews. Music that stirs up feelings is welcome; music that stimulates const­ru­ctive thought without stirring up feelings is slightly less welcome, but still welcome; music that begs for just one question — «did somebody just make me feel like a complete idiot?» — just makes me feel like a complete idiot. And it's no fun reviewing music in a state like that.

The Books are a creative duo from New York City (the Holy Mother of Progressive Bull, among other won­derful things), consisting of Nick Zammuto on guitar and Paul de Jong on cello, and backed by The New York Symphony Orchestra of Awesome Samples. They call themselves The Books because they have read a lot of books (personal assumption), and if you haven't read a lot of books — and watch­ed a lot of (obscure) movies, and listened to a lot of (obscure) music — you probably have no business listening to them in the first place. As for myself, I am in no way qualified to compete with these guys' level of knowledge of whatever it is they know, even if I did see Godard's Contempt, on which one of these tracks is based (but I'm a Breathless person myself, so, other than a small flash of Brigitte Bardot in the nude, there was really nothing to get too much excited about). Thus, I'm stumped.

Basically, The Books just play small snippets and snuffets of folksy melodies, with acoustic gui­tars, violins, cellos, and electric bass (the latter of which periodically blows radioactive holes through my speakers). On their own, these snippets would be completely worthless — the play­ing is unexceptional and the «melodies» are underworked, when they are «worked» at all. The gist is that they are densely peppered with samples, and, if I get it right, the samples are supposed to in­teract with the melodies in creative ways, resulting in... in... aw, crap.

I do officially admit that the song titles are original enough to merit a carrot. ʽEnjoy Your Wor­ries, You May Never Have Them Againʼ is a clever tweet — if only it had something to do with the actual track, which sounds like a home rehearsal of a daring, but erratic and vision-less folk guitarist spliced with a quiet mishmash of avantgarde violins and people talking in Robert Altman fashion (including a long story narrated by a lady about a stalker). Verdict: this is approxi­mately 2,000 years ahead of its time, and these guys belong in a MoMA installation.

ʽRead, Eat, Sleepʼ is a combination of minimalistic acoustic patterns, chimes, and deep bass, mi­xed in Brian Eno fashion and sprayed with samples of a spelling bee. Conclusion: "By digitising thunder and traffic noises, Georgia was able to compose aleatoric music". While this gives the lis­tener a fine chance to learn the relatively recent neologism «aleatoric», I cannot in the least agree with raving critical opinions — as far as my organism sees it, the samples and the vapid musical backing cancel each other out rather than complement each other.

Only a couple of tracks actually gives the impression of adhering to the non-rules of mu­sique concrète — ʽExcess Straussessʼ is two minutes of cellos and violins echoing from one channel to another, and the last two snippets really try to weave some sort of pseudo-musical pattern from sampled bubbles and babbles (ʽDeafkidsʼ with its deconstructed thrash metal bassline almost bor­ders on funny — there, I've said it). Other than that, there is no coherence or conceptuality here except for whatever you might want to invent yourself, particularly when you are a professional musical critic for whom «thought for food» is a harsh reality of life.

Speaking of life, one opinion that I have encountered is that Thought For Food is supposed to represent a special «panorama of life», with its array of samples gathered from all sorts of sources and the music merely a sonic backing to add an artsier dimension to the documentary nature of the panorama. Well... okay. Perhaps this will make someone reevaluate all of Life's values, bring open-mindedness, freshness, a renewed sense of purpose, and a reignited taste for adventurous feelings into one's existence.

My position, unfortunately, will remain rather retrograde — I find Thought For Food, and parti­cularly the excited critical reception that has surrounded it, to be just one more sign of a general creative exhaustion of the 2000s. I admit that, to a certain degree, it is a technical success: the samples have been integrated smoothly enough to make the whole thing listenable as a piece of «music» rather than a patchwork of «avantagrde sonic effects» à la ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ. But «lis­tenable» is certainly not enough, and I'd much rather go back to the meaningful sonic nightmare of ʽNo. 9ʼ than sit once more through the bland «non-statement» of Thought For Food, so care­fully and meticulously crafted by these two guys.

Nice, intellectual guys, and there is nothing wrong in trying to look for new ways to revolutionize the musical world — it's just that the hun­ger for change sometimes gets so big that people get inadequately happy at the mere idea of look­ing for it. Never mind if you don't find anything. Just keep looking, it'll come to you. Or maybe it has already come. Yep, that's right, it's here, it's just what we needed. Isn't it great? Yeah, it's not for everyone, but what is? Justin Bieber? Come on now, conservatism won't help make this world a better place. Besides, you wanted progress, didn't you? You want it — you got it. What's the point of your disrespectful thumbs down? Ob­struct development? Cool off the optimism? Sell us all to MTV? When we have just seen the future of rock'n'roll, and its name is... ALEATORIC!!!

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