- Release Info -------------------------------------------------------------- -
Artist: The Books
Album: The Way Out
Label: Temporary Residence
Playtime: 50:07 min
Genre: Indie
URL: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:apftxzqdldje
Rip date: 2010-07-26
Street date: 2010-07-20
Size: 70.52 MB
Type: Normal
Quality: 187 kbps / 4410kHz / Joint Stereo
- Release Notes ------------------------------------------------------------- -
"Welcome to a new beginning" declares a voice at the start of The Way Out,
and this album does indeed mark a fresh new chapter for the Books: a return
to record-making five years after the fantastic Lost and Safe, on a new
label, with a newly open-ended, wide-ranging approach to their work. It may
not initially sound that way: opener "Group Autogenics I," one of several
pieces that draw on guided meditation-style self-help recordings, feels
almost like Books-by-numbers, with a gently humorous, disorienting oddness,
juxtaposed with genuinely deeply relaxing sonics, that will be immediately
familiar to fans of their past albums. After that, though, the duo stretches
beyond its comfort zone in multiple directions at once, pushing at the
boundaries of an already utterly singular style. The acoustic strings
(primarily guitar and cello) that dominated their earlier output are still
present, but they share space with a dizzying array of instrumental and
quasi-instrumental sounds, from twinkling music boxes to a full-scale
sample-generated orchestra of archaic brass and woodwinds. And while
scavenged spoken word samples remain the most defining element of the Books'
music, anchoring each of these cuts save for the four sung, lyric-based
"proper songs" (including the gloriously geeky, math-worshiping chorale
"Beautiful People," which announces, slightly disingenuously: "We genuflect
before pure abstraction"), they're less concerned with constructing
linguistic puzzles out of their samples here ù cleverly editing them to
evince a sublimely witty illogic and absurdity ù than with exploring their
emotional nuances and often surreal humanity. Most tracks focus on a small
number of voices, creating a sense of context and resonance without
necessarily allowing for full comprehension. Hence, we get a tentative,
intimate series of answering machine messages; a nonsensical bedtime tale
about a Peter Rabbit-like character named Hip Hop; an inexplicably prickly
grammarian vehemently insisting that "I Am Who I Am." "A Cold Freezin' Night"
is a hilarious, slightly chilling tour de force built around a battle of
(increasingly violent) words between a young brother and sister, set to a
thumping disco beat. "I Didn't Know That" is even more striking musically ù
the closest thing yet to a Books pop hit, and definitely the funkiest they've
ever been, recalling Squarepusher's nimble bass playing and Akufen's
micro-sampled funk barrages. The stated intention for The Way Out was for
each track to be "its own rabbit hole," and the album does indeed manage to
survey an impressively disparate set of worlds and modes. Still, each one
remains readily recognizable as belonging to the Books' own unique,
unequivocal universe, which, happily, seems to be expanding at least twice as
rapidly as our own.
- Track List ---------------------------------------------------------------- -
01. Group Autogenics I ( 3:44)
02. IDKT ( 1:42)
03. I Didn't Know That ( 3:38)
04. A Cold Freezin' Night ( 3:22)
05. Beautiful People ( 2:52)
06. I Am Who I Am ( 3:01)
07. Chain of Missing Links ( 4:30)
08. All You Need is a Wall ( 3:44)
09. Thirty Incoming ( 4:57)
10. A Wonderful Phrase By Gandhi ( 0:21)
11. We Bought the Flood ( 5:04)
12. The Story of Hip Hop ( 4:30)
13. Free Translator ( 3:50)
14. Group Autogenics II ( 4:52)
- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -