The Books has been releasing conceptually obscure records for years now, and with their latest album, The Way Out, they’ve continued that line of creative disguise. While often placing fragmented sound and musical pastiche above pop formality to great effect, they never seemed to favor or bow to any trend or latent genre-based tendencies of their peers, if any existed. The Books haven’t veered away from the sort of arty, electronic-fueled construction on their previous albums and have placed their faith even more so in these vocal samples and clicked beats as a way to influence and convey the buried sentiments and ideas built within each song. The childish call and response threats of “A Cold Freezin’ Night” turn the repetitive shouts into an examination of juvenile acceptance and acknowledgement of violence as a game of one-upmanship. The backing clicks and broken melodies filtering behind the vocal samples create a hazy and sometimes erratic distillation of The Books aesthetic, which is to say that they’ve once again managed to make seemingly arbitrary samples work within cohesive song structures. And while many of these songs may lack some of the more identifiable elements of pop songs, i.e. verse-chorus-verse progression or sustained harmonic melody, these songs never feel trivial or overly self-conscious. They merely exist and in our interest, we can listen to them, or not, but they’ll still be there.
Tracklisting:
01. Group Autogenics I
02. IDKT
03. I Didn’t Know That
04. Cold Freezin’ Night
05. Beautiful People (listen to the mp3 below)
06. I Am Who I Am
07. Chain of Missing Links
08. All You Need Is A Wall
09. 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
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