Has it really been fifteen months since I came across The Books? I remember clearly the first time I listened to Thought for Food. I was sitting on the sidewalk in front of my local laundromat, two loads in the washers, enjoying the shade underneath the green awning that hangs over the glass façade. Tucked into my shoulder bag I had a clutch of promo CDs that I dug out of my mailbox on the way over. My usual routine is to click through a track or two of each to get a sense of which records I want to listen to completely. After breezing through and discarding several records I've now forgotten, I snapped Thought for Food into the discman and listened straight through.
It was different-- that was clear right away-- but it was an easy listen. I put down whatever I was reading, settled into my plastic patio chair, and squinted through the sunlight at the Greek restaurant across the street, concentrating on what was coming through my headphones: the familiar sound of guitar and violin cut up and mixed with vocal samples. Thought for Food was easy to love but I realized that I'd have trouble describing what made it interesting. It was too simple, too subtle; there was too much space.
Now comes The Lemon of Pink. Having listened to The Books' debut god knows how many times since last summer and thoroughly absorbed its sound, the element of surprise has gone. In fact, the first time I heard the six-minute title suite that opens this album it seemed eerily familiar. In the first minute there's a repeating two-chord piano riff sourced from scratchy vinyl, a banjo, a collage of violin fragments, and a sample of a heavily accented woman intoning the nonsense phrase that gives the record its name. But then comes a surprise: naked, unprocessed vocals by a woman named Anne Doerner, far too modern sounding to be pulled from an old record.
Indeed, the most apparent difference between The Lemon of Pink and Thought for Food is this record's greater use of original vocals. The Books obviously have a lot of old records lying around, so it makes sense to insert a bit of structure into their finely wrought collages. Some of the vocals find their way into tracks that are essentially proper songs, others are cut and pasted into glitched-up melodic configurations. Doerner's contribution to the title track is one of the best examples of the former. Her cracked, bluesy purr fits well with The Books' solid American roots core, and the melody is spare and understated, wisely remaining one of many elements rather than becoming the prime focus of the song. There's so much breathing room here, and her voice fills it perfectly.
Books co-founder Nick Zammuto sings on several of the other tracks that play with song structure. "Don't Even Sing About It" is unusually dark and downcast, almost like an old Will Oldham dirge given The Books treatment, with unpredictable vocal samples cutting through the marching guitar plucking. "Get used to hanging if you hang long enough" is the sum total of the original lyrics, but it's the sort of cryptic splinter that suits this essentially fragmented music. "The Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice?" begins in typical Books fashion, with quick surges of crowd noise, vibraphone, guitar and bits of violin, but then the voice comes in, a flat sing-speak intoning Isaac Brockisms like "the mind has a mind of its own." I'm a little iffy on these two; where Thought for Food's "All Our Base Are Belong to Them" was weird and otherworldly, these vocal tracks fit neatly into the experimental indie rock landscape. Both are solid, but somehow the presence of this voice makes The Books sound just a little less special.
Contrast these more song-oriented bits with the sampled voice (I think it's Doerner's again) run through the shredder on "There Is No There". The various instruments and samples fold in and then start to swirl into an aural kaleidoscope, and then the vocals flutter past, too quick and broken for rational comprehension but emotionally clear as glass. You don't know what they're saying, but the feeling is immediate and intense. The power of "There Is No There" makes me think that at this point The Books still work best as collage artists, assembling odds and ends into new and affecting compositions.
The Lemon of Pink makes for an interesting contrast with Thought for Food, in part because the two records have so much in common. Several of this record's tracks that closely follow the Thought for Food template are even better than their forbears, with more dynamic range and a greater sense of development. The way the sample of a flight attendant from a Japanese airline forms the centerpiece of "Tokyo" is absolutely perfect, matching the editing brilliance of Thought for Food's "Aleatoric", and "Take Time" is one of the more epic 3\xBD-minute instrumentals you'll come across, building from quiet, simple samples into a joyous cluster of words and acoustic sound. The Lemon of Pink may sound a bit like this duo's debut, but it also sounds like nobody else. The Books remain more or less a genre of one.
