Don’t let reviewers’ inability to pigeonhole The Books’ sample-driven sound collages. Terms like “Folktronica” don’t begin to capture the essence of their carefully crafted found sound creations.
When a friend of mine recently suggested I absolutely had to check out The Books’ latest release The Way Out, I of course went to their Wikipedia page, since I hadn’t heard of them before. I have to admit I was briefly disturbed by the fact that the entry puts them in the hilariously-named genre Folktronica. As much as I enjoy some good Hick Hop, I wasn’t sure I was in the mood for whatever “Folktronica” might turn out to be. I’m glad I ignored that incredibly misleading description of what The Books do; when I finally got my hands on a copy of “The Way Out” and Thought for Food, I was pleasantly surprised by an eclectic and tightly-produced pastiche of sonic art that I might try to describe by saying something like “it’s sort of like Pinback meets My Life In the Bush of Ghosts“. Which also miserably fails to convey their exceedingly listenable inventiveness. Most of their music incorporates random samples of people talking and other sounds, but the musicalness of how they incorporate these sounds is so well-executed that you never really think of it as a guitarist and cellist playing with samples. The only decent comparison I can think of is the rather obscure Bill Nelson, who throughout the 80′s churned out a massive body of exceptionally musical sound collages that came across more like ambient music or the sounds of a film you weren’t watching. There’s a ton of press out there about The Books, which apparently hasn’t in itself led to a lot of unit sales for the duo. In many earlier interviews, they seemed to try to blame this on fans’ file sharing, something didn’t resonate as true for me, so I was glad to learn from articles like this more recent Boston.com article that they’ve since accepted that they have to tour. And they are as I type this; visit their site for show dates.
The two videos below are from their DVD “Play All”, which appears to be available only on their website. Their videos are apparently assembled in the same fashion as their music, i.e.: with a lot of well-edited “found bits”.
Classy Penguin
A chippy upbeat groove. Worth watching, if only for the classy penguin move at 4:12.
Be Good to Them Always
In another unfair comparison, sort of like Califone meets Laurie Anderson.
