the books "lost and safe"

wait am i thinking of the new manitoba?

and, hey

is it just me, or do some of the songs sound like rob crow's non-pinback stuff?

Anyway I'll be d/ling this tonight.

I find this new record to be really unfocused and in many ways empty of the intellectual aspect that helped balance the pure pop moments and the avant-garde noodling of the previous two releases. Matmos, Hood? Sure, I hear it... but I can't find the sort of whimsical quality that made Thought For Food and Lemon Of Pink so compelling. This is quite a departure.

For now, colour me disappointed... ... but I'm not going to give up on it and I certainly hope something will spark for me.

At the rate they're going, their next album will be packed with more glitch and static than you can shake a stick at. It'll sound like AGF, except with actual tunes.

The first track is pretty interesting though, it reminds me of Neu's Lieber Honig. Or the end of side one, i'm not totally sure.

Guys... guys listen. This is the best album of the 00's for me. I'm a nerd for 'collage' and sampled music, The Books, Paavoharju and The Avalanches released three of my top 10 records of that decade and they all share the same sort of ADD approach at making music. But this album, we need to discuss it more over here! Like say, how can you not like a song like say 'Be Good to Them Always'!? The exploded cello! The insistent bounce of the basketball beat! All the voice samples and soundbites that seem mindless at first but they were carefully picked to evoke a strong emotion out of nowhere.
Please listen to this if you haven't already, let this album suck you in and get lost in its stories and carefully crafted textures and rhythms. It's a lifeform on its own. It captures humanity in a record. It laughs, it cries, it falls in love, it cares, it dreams, it gives up, it grows.

revisiting this a ton lately, think it's probably their best record, quickly becoming one of my favorite albums ever honestly. idk how to explain this exactly but the magic of The Books is that they find all these moments that, unlike traditional sampling, were never really meant for mass consumption and are probably not remembered by anyone, but open up these little context-free windows into someone else's life through which you can make your own psychic connection. it brings life to the past in a way you don't really hear anywhere else.

also just dig the cleverness of these guys - the end of "None but Shining Hours" has this skittering rhythm that almost sounds like it's tapped out on a table or something (it might just be from a really old record though); it doesn't quite repeat though. anyway on vinyl there's so much bass in this part that it actually causes the needle to skip, which I originally thought could be attributed to a bad pressing, but listening again I think this was totally intentional. I mean the record itself does end by slowly accumulating surface noise which I'm guessing they knew would come off a lot different if you actually bought the record.

^ yes, or the mid-section (~2:25) of "An Animated Description of Mr. Maps" when the beat that was introduced at the outset matches up with the sampled description of Mr. Maps. Impossibly exciting for what it is.