 |
The Books - Lost and Safe I was lost in the woods. I ran there, and I don't remember why. I was really frightened. I ran into an underbrush, and threw myself down on a dirt road, sobbing. I was only eight years old. I cut my knees tripping on the roots of a tree, and then I sat under it in the foetal position, hypnotized by honey dripping from makeshift sickles. After a few moments, the sobbing stopped. The terror of the unknown receded. I brushed the dirt off of my jeans and wiped the tears from my face. And the foliage interlocking above me suddenly seemed warm and loving. I was lost, but I felt protected, euphoric in the fact that no one could find me. I sat there with all of the time in the world. And all I wanted to do was think. I didn't have to be anything to anyone, I could just be. I closed my eyes and the katydids became melodious, and as I listened, I thought, and the sounds I was hearing and the thoughts I was thinking were one.
And that was the last time I heard Lost and Safe. Until the first week of April, when it was released, to the surprise of my childhood self, as The Books' third album. The Books are sound sculptors Nick Zammuto and Paul De Jong. Their debut album, Thought for Food, caught critics by surprise with its pointed synthesis of folk and electronics. Relying on textures, sparse banjo and guitar, and methodically sequenced found sounds, Thought for Food was folksy, playful, cerebral, and nostalgic. Its unorthodox mix of nature sounds, folk instruments and arrangements and electronics did not feel counterintuitive, but natural. By the time their second album, The Lemon of Pink was released, they had gained a small cult following. Lemon Of Pink had less complex compositions and lighter acoustics; it opened with a disarming, and charmingly bluesy track, and while the vocal samples were not as inspired, the stripped down approach worked to bring in new fans. Lost and Safe is not as ornate or uncanny as Thought for Food, but it does feel as lively and granular. While Thought for Food was whimsical and photographic; sampling from Godard films and awkward father-daughter conversations, Lost and Safe is more narrative based, and at times it is positively cinematic.
Nick Zammuto lends his voice to nearly every track on Lost and Safe, with half speaking, have singing lilts, he allows the arrangements to organize and establish themselves before his voice chimes in, skating on the surface of the guitars and textures. Whether his voice is meant as an exclamation point, accentuating and seasoning the arrangements, or as narration; structuring and mediating the music, 'situating' it, is up to the listener. I found Zammuto's high pitched, singing whispers somewhat inaudible, particularly against the multi-layered strings and found sounds. I did not know what he was 'singing' until I looked at the record sleeve. His voice was just another instrument. When I read the lyrics, however, I was surprised by how detailed and poetic the lyrics are—particularly on Smells like Content and An Animated Description of Mr.Maps. It's as if Zammuto opened up a Heidegger text and began to chant at it as if it were a hymnal. Other than Zammuto's vocals, the narrative spine of the album is defined by found speech arrangements, which are often strung together to produce ironic or absurd sentences and phrases. It seems that vocals and found speech have become The Books trademark, and they work here on every track, displaying the jammed and stilted meanings between words. Like Burroughsian cut-up, the mixed up phrases dissect the speaker's original words and reveal subliminal meanings, too strange and allusive to have any kind of definitive meaning. Sometimes the cut-ups are overtly comical, but always in a thought-provoking way, such as the speaker who says "expectation leads to disappointment. If you don't expect something big, huge, and exciting, usually uh, I don't know, it's just not as, yeah."
I was particularly impressed by An Animated Description of Mr. Maps, a track whose sweeping cinematic grandeur and intense, regal percussion displays The Books' ability to make tracks on par with blockbuster films, no actors or directors needed. The track sounds like an army marching, and makes me feel as though I'm surrounded by jungle in the heart of South Vietnam. The character of 'Mr. Maps' does not seem extraordinary, but it's his intense sensitivity to sensory experience that makes his presence so threatening. In addition to his talent for "recognizing patterns in the most delicate array of tangled lines", Mr Maps "saw red, but thought five", referring to a typical alphanumeric-color association that exists in synasthesiacs. The narrative of Mr Maps is told through found-sounds that alternate with Zammuto's lyrics. The track concludes, perhaps revealingly off topic: "I want all of the American people to understand, that it is understandable that the American people can not possibly understand." Understand?
Lost and Safe mixes and matches content and context, but, like previous albums; its success lies in ambiguities and disrupted meanings. Though the samples interact with Zammuto's voice in a way that plays with narrative, there's nothing linear or logical about the album. Like Lewis Carrol, whose quote from the Jabberwocky appears in "vogt dig for kloppervok", The Books love language, but lay just adjacent to it, where they can sense the obliqueness between definitions and make us fall in love with the claylike ambiguity of speech.
|
