Thought For Food by The Books
I first started listening to the Books because of this project; in a restful gamble out among the weeds and brush, the rolling waves of laughter, voice samples and guitar plucking somehow worked together in unexpected ways to create an incredibly rewarding album.
Having listened to the Books before, the element of surprise is out. Still, Thought For Food and The Lemon of Pink almost feel of the same vein. The same elements that made The Lemon of Pink so amazing were first present on Thought For Food, the band's debut, and listening to these albums back to back, you would be very hard pressed to describe a very noticeable difference between the two ("Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again" and "Read, Eat, Sleep" remind me particularly of The Lemon of Pink, though I'm not sure why).
Being familiar with what The Books can do with just some electronic mixes, voice samples and sporadic percussion and guitars does not lessen any of the surprise with the music itself. One such surprise would be the off-kilter humor present on the track, "Motherless Bastard", in which a man denies being a young boy's father to the point of making the child cry, or the track "Contempt", in which two men interchange dialogue originally intended between a man and a wife ("What about my ankles, do you like them? ... My thighs, do you think they're pretty?").
For the same reasons The Lemon of Pink is one of my favorite albums, so too is Thought For Food. There are few musicians who can take voice sampling and make it new all over again, and the fact that they do this successfully on two albums is reason enough to love The Books.
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