Unless you possess the singularly focused mind of an idiot savant or fundementalist nutjob your thoughts (and mine) skitter and bump around, tenuously linked to a vast array of experiences by sense and memory. Even in moments of concentration there lurk tempting tangents to far off ideas. If we look closer at the thought process it seems less logical and efficient than dynamic, surprising and, at times, beautiful. Listening to The Books is like hearing someone think.
"Lost and Safe" is the most musical of their albums to date and the first truly amazing album I've heard all year. Like their previous two LPs, The Books create near minimal, surrealist sound collage from obscure spoken voice tracks and other found-sounds (creaking doors, telephones...) along with their own creations, often heaviliy digitally processed guitars, banjo, strings, percussion and singing. Until now the band hid wizard-like behind a gossamer curtain of guest vocalists and glitched-out ambient quirck-ery. "Lost" actually finds The Books sounding more like a band without dulling their experimental edge. They provide their own, more prominently featured vocals and shift the compositional balance of many songs from technical form to conceptual / abstractly emotional content. And when I say "prominently featured vocals" I mean barely audible sing-speaking of what might as well be passages from art criticism essays or 1940s sci-fi. Still, with the change, albeit subtle, comes a stonger sense of identity both for the album and the band.
If you're starting from scratch with The Books check out the sixth track "An Animated Description of Mr. Maps" (hear it now on their website thebooksmusic.com - click "new books" then "LIVING ROOM"). What sounds like a drum kit with aluminum foil dampers perfectly pounds the speech patterns of a man as he delivers a brief monologue aptly named by the song's title. It's one of those unbelievable "did I just hear that, is that REALLY what they're doing?" moments that has the potential to elevate an obscure genre to pop status. Fear not, die hard art house and indie freaks, the next track "Venice" presents a news recording of Salvador Dali painting "The Lion of Venice" more or less as is.
The resonance of this album doesn't come from its considerable avante-credentials or Nick Zammuto's presence as a soft spoken frontman. The Books reach a deeper, more active place in the mind than the area used to process other music partly because their songs are mostly made of other sounds than music, synaesthetically building harmony from things you're not sure you can hear. The elegantly cross-associative play of samples, music and lyrics also mirrors our thoughts themselves, jumping from one to another on streams of electricity without apparent reason or warning but not without reward. It's as if the songs conatin audible cues meant to activate a music preexistent and fully formed in our minds. The fact that they can do anything remotely like this is pretty amazing. That they can make it stirring, rich and relevant is brilliant.
See also The Microphones, Grandaddy, Rachel's, and the Blue Man Group
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