All You Need Is A POLL: The Books albums

Voted for the most boring answer but sigh it's my fav

Lemon?

I’d have to relisten to em all but I suspect The Way Out is probably the best even if it’s not as significant as the first two

Can’t believe it’s been 11 years, wow. Bet you couldn’t find these types of recordings very easily today.

funny to see the thread revived, i randomly put on The Way Out late last night for the first time in years and had a great time with it. i wasnt super sold on it when it came out, felt a little too cute, and with too many songs that felt like actual songs rather than the totally free-floating stream of consciousness collages that i wanted to hear. but it holds up better & better every time i go back to it.

same here didn't think much of it when it came out but I relisten to all 4 every year or so (at least, I used to) and generally come away thinking it's the best one

zchyrs, yes

y'all are definitely making me want to revisit The Way Out, I had a very similar reaction when it first appeared. Lemon of Pink is closest to my heart but will be fun if I can find time to relisten to all 4 this week

xp no shame in that! I, the pollrunner haven't even picked yet, but I think it might be a coin toss between that one and Lost & Safe

Lost and Safe

High five! Re-listened Way Out yesterday too and was also surprised at how it sounded way better than how I remembered.

Answer is still Lost & Safe for me though. It’s probably my favorite album of the 00’s.

Did they ever explained why they disbanded? Are they in good terms?

Btw if you haven’t watched this small documentary of Nick Zammuto, it’s a great insight into his process and lifestyle. He gets life imho:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raJa45rwJcw

Wish they had a reissue of Way Out it’s the only LP I don’t own physically and there’s only a couple of really expensive copies on discogs.

i believe they are on extremely bad terms

Yeah I think I read that somewhere, sad to hear :/ their solo stuff is great but it doesn’t reach the same heights of what they did together.

This is the only article I could find right now but it doesn’t really explain what happened:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pg8qnm/the-books-the-lemon-of-pink-reissue-vinyl-me-please

Closest clue come from Zammuto who kind of expresses some frustration at him wanting to tour and do new material to make more money and Paul not really responding to the rush of doing so.

yeah sounds like paul kind of checked out while nick was under the impression they both were planning to devote a certain amount of time and effort to the group going forward.

still have a memory of hearing thought for food the first time and it just being so unique...like not really in conversation with any other music i was listening to at the time but still having a throughline of melody and structure that made it so easy and addictive to listen to.

There was a small trend of “folktronica” going on at the time but noone else was doing stuff as inventive as them. They were looking at it from another angle. They were more into plunderphonics and collage than into just putting beats under acoustic instruments.

I wouldn’t put their music as similar to Four Tet or Caribou per example.

Not throwing shade at them, I actually love them too but for very different reasons.

yeah agreed

Maybe and that’s a big maybe the closest comparisons could be The Avalanches or Arthur Russell… not for sound but in how they approach composition.

I haven’t really made a deep dive into what their inspirations are - favorite albums, songs, artists… even movies - but that could shed some light on how they approach music.

i like all of them but the way out is the one i love

Currently revisiting their solo work and it’s cool to me how it’s so clear what each of them contributed to the sound of The Books. Paul seems quieter, more thoughtful and less concerned for textures, Zammuto’s solo work is more “childlike” or “crazy scientist” more concerned about having fun experimenting and obsessing about the way things sound. I might be wrong but Paul gives me the impression of being more of a musician and Zammuto more as a producer.

They do sound like they both learned from one another but their solo work makes more evident what their strenghts are and how they complimented each other.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Totally forgot about these guys, will have to check the solo work. I wrote this as a Columbus OH show preview:
The Books
Thursday @ Wexner
The Books play (and sample) plucked, strummed and bowed instruments, while talking and singing with countless other sounds, also sampled (and played). Waves of fragments move calmly, and, on their first album, The Lemon of Pink, venerable voices provide “helpful” gibberish. The Books like to ricochet through such decay, although the subsequent Lost & Save risks spelling this out a little too plainly, before zigzagging through unexpected insights and comedy. Their new version of Nick Drake’s “Cello Song” even grooves with the glitches of a cheapo CD-R! Which is where I put what the publicist sent me. A lonng time ago.

sheesh after all those posts I wasn't expecting The Way Out to place last. I was one of the votes sooooo

Sorry I can’t betray my inconditional love for lost and safe

Yup I didn't make it to Thought for Food in my relisten but ultimately ended up going with Lost and Safe. The Way Out is a little too busy and propulsive; Lemon of Pink felt a shade too subdued and calm coming after the last two in my reverse-chronological relisten, as much as I love it. Lost and Safe has the perfect balance.

Look at it this way: you may fall and break your leg

you know 16 votes seems pretty low for this. I feel like every ILX thread on The Books a decade ago must've had like 4000 posts. hell there's even an entire subforum dedicated to them. guess it's just one of those things that didn't stick, huh

there's also just the fact that this website's userbase has dwindled over the years... but yeah, it feels very "of its time." that's not to say its bad music -- it's great music! -- but i guess they've been somewhat forgotten about.

i would've voted Lemon of Pink, but I haven't heard their last two records so didn't think it would be fair for me to vote

okay so I decided to pull out Thought For Food again - the record turns 20 in two days!! still feels like one of those albums that really built everything from the ground up, it sounds like nothing else. I used to think of it as "folktronica" but there aren't any electronic or glitch elements on it really. Now I think of it as like..."what if Penguin Cafe Orchestra and The Bran Flakes swapped some members?" even after all this time there's still such an air of mystery to it. like, what's going on with the vocal bits on "Contempt"? or that drugged-out drawl on "All Our Base"? where did they get the sample of the lady on the first track? why does it end the way it does? so much to puzzle over...

for me this album occupies a space in my brain reserved for like...quotes from old Simpsons episodes. all the disjointed spoken bits are just so weirdly memorable.

also how clever of them to have a bit that just repeats the world "aleatoric" over and over...as though they were writing the critics' ledes for them

and also I have a heart condition, and I told him I have a heart condition

okay - I actually found out what the source of that sample was - Zammuto wrote a very detailed blog about this track

https://zammutosound.com/blogs/nick-zammuto-s-blog/posts/the-track-enjoy-your-worries-you-may-never-have-them-again

Around that time I sampled a daytime court show from TV, where a woman selling vacation tickets was being harassed by a man unsatisfied by his accommodations. She went on this jaw-dropping motor-mouthed rant about how she had lost her job and had a heart condition, and it turned out to be a great stand-in for a free-jazz like instrumental solo. If you listen carefully you’ll hear my voice slightly ahead, doubling the text, which I recorded by speaking each phrase as a loop until I ran out of breath. I isolated each ‘out of breath’ phrase and reassembled them to match the original so that it sounded as if I was constantly running out of breath throughout the entire rant. Then, behind her voice is a rhythm created by zipping my fingernail across one of those crackerjacks box style holograms, with the ridged prisms on the front surface. A sample from Kurosawa’s ‘Seven Samurai’ (one of my favorite films) ends her rant succinctly.

The cello solo in the next section was created by wiggling the playback cursor over a cello recording in the timeline of Soundforge, to give it that wiggle effect. “Myself, April, Tammy, and Brad” were the plaintiffs in the next case on that daytime court show. Then there’s a sample of a film (Goddard, I believe), in Russian, where a man professes his love to a prostitute and has a heart attack mid sentence, instantaneously dying (as an echo of the previous heart condition). Then there is a sample of a Japanese fellow reading stock reports, which we selected purely for rhythmic reasons, not knowing until much later what he was actually talking about.

The blog teases posts about other tracks, but unfortunately, this is the only one he writes about.

It is odd that Zammuto, who was for a time a meticulous blogger, has just gone completely dark for the last 6 years. He reminds me a lot of a friend of mine, who is very intelligent and well-read, that just decided to go offline forever, and now has challenged himself to live in a van for a year. We still send handwritten letters back and forth.

Weirdly, I actually heard from an old friend of mine who works for [Big Tech Corp], who happened to meet Zammuto recently. He brought it up because I was the one who got him into the Books way back. Per friend, Zammuto also works for [Big Tech Corp] from Vermont "making weird sounds or something for them." Take that as you will.

Also, my friend who works for [Big Tech Corp] is also completely dark/unfindable on the the internet. When you know how the sausage gets made...