Insound, Pay Me!!!

Thought For Food by The Books

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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.

Don't Even Sing About It

The Lemon of Pink by The Books

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Today I went for a walk in the woods by myself, in a place I had once discovered many years ago. While the curves of the tree trunks and the logs all seemed the same, it also felt smaller, as if the world had shrunk and I was overcrowding it. During the solitary walk to what turned out to be something of a "master garden" (neither nursery nor botanical garden), I took my time to listen to the Books' The Lemon of Pink.

I have never listened to the Books before, and without this project, I probably never would have even had them come up on my radar. The Books largely takes samples of sounds, like voice recordings and song samples, combined with electronic mixed with acoustic folk.

As abstract and experimental as it sounds, the type of music they make is more towards the familiar than the "out-there"; with just a few notes on a violin and the creaking of a door in the background, the songs feel calm, while voices -- screams, laughs, prayers to god and airplane hostesses -- work to create a texture of feelings. "Explanation Mark" doesn't even feature music, but a woman and a man layered over each other, each just making random noises.

There is a patient energy to the album; every sound seems to be comfortably at home in each song (they even title a song "Take Time"! Coincidence? I think not.) "Don't Even Sing About It" is pretty dark, with the lines "Get used to hanging if you hang long enough" repeated over and over, though the next track "The Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice?", features a wave of laughter repeated throughout the song.

It's very easy to simply get lost in the textures of The Lemon of Pink; there are so many samples that it's surprising how they come together in a way that is not only melodious but beautiful.