Album Review : The Books - The Way Out
- Written by Robert Freeman
The Books are more of an art project than a band, a collection of collage cut-and-paste found objects and a homemade percussion section put together to form songs (in the loosest sense of the word). The result is music that might lack any discernible chorus/verse, but has an odd kind of structure running through it – what member Nick Zammuto describes as the ‘emotional resonance’ of the music, in-between the plonks and beeps layered on top of distorted ‘found sounds’ harvested over the years by both members. The break between The Books’ last album, The Lemon Of Pink, and The Way Out, their first release on the Temporary Residence label (home to Low and Mogwai amongst others) has been five years, time Zammuto and Paul de Jong presumably spent combing through the mountain of weird crap (‘4,000 tapes’) that they had collected.
The Way Out sees the band combining their continuing obsession with found vocals (primarily old tapes gleaned from charity shops around the US) with Gandhi samples, talkboys, and self-help tapes, all put together to form a strange, hypnotic hotchpotch of voices. “The working concept for the sound of The Way Out was pretty simple”, says Zammuto, “Every track is its own rabbit hole”. Both members of the band are at great pains to emphasise the focus of the music though, and despite the fact that the word ‘aleatoric’ is repeated over and over in their songs (most notably in Thought for Food’s ‘Read, Eat, Sleep’), The Books are less Dadaists and more collage artists – there’s a careful orchestration to the weirdness.
The main problem though, is that self help – one of the main sources of samples on the album –is VERY ANNOYING. On top of this, The Books continue their sway into interesting projects but have recently acquired a disturbing interest in original vocals, and, woah... tunes. There are rather a lot of verses (still a lack of choruses, PHEW), and although still peppered with clicks, bangs and digitised effects, more generic formal constraints seem to be reasserting themselves on a band that have in the past been dogmatic to say the least.
Highlights like ‘I Didn’t Know That’ and ‘A Cold Freezin’ Night’ contain the expected stellar guitar work and voice samples manipulated around a beat, but in its more standard, subdued moments the album strays slightly into Broken Social Scene/Four Tet b-side territory (‘Free Translator’ for example is a fairly bog-standard folk song). But then you get a song like ‘Beautiful People’, the tune of which is structured around the twelfth root of two (1.05946 - the mathematical relationship between musical notes in a modern chromatic scale, obv) and sung by a chorus of Inuits from Greenland, and all is forgiven.