The Books left the world just as quietly as they entered it. Guitarist and vocalist Nick Zammuto and cellist Paul de Jong seemed to appear from thin air with 2002's Thought for Food, a startlingly innovative album that exuded a strange ease. The dark humor they squeezed from thrift-store VHS tapes and home videos in the decade to follow was both unnerving and sedative, recalling bouts of nostalgia just vague enough to belong to anyone, spliced deftly on the three albums that followed. After uploading a 12-minute video detailing their farewell box set, A Dot In Time, they disbanded in 2012. Nick Zammuto quickly began his own endeavors under his last name. Paul de Jong, however, went into hiding.
After the exhaustion of The Way Out, de Jong uses IF to return refreshed and willing to reveal sides previously overshadowed. The cello was merely an instrument in the Books’ work, for instance, but here it becomes its own character. He filters it through glitches on "Debt Free" and anxious whirring during "Golden Gate", but it truly comes into its own on "Age of the Sea". Moody chords resonate in an empty room, giving off a hollow tone before lo-fi field recordings from a beach enter. A seagull calls out as de Jong creates one of his most beautiful cello lines to date, leaning into the instrument and breathing life into what seems to be an uncovered personal memory sanded down by time.
De Jong hasn't abandoned the duo’s trademark collage-pop absurdity, but he has refined it. Zammuto's last two albums, while farcical and energetic, had numerous throwaway tracks; IF is more calculated. At 51 years old, ten years Zammuto's elder, de Jong plays with his toys differently, and the tracks are always, no matter what, kept tidy. Slapstick number "Snakes" indulges in a man’s manic hallucinations of serpents for under a minute, as if de Jong seeks to prove he’s capable of matching Zammuto's colorful, campy energy. Otherwise he evokes a grave solitude: a man standing in an open field, maybe, palms grazing over the tips of tall grass, muting his thoughts to let the sound of air fill his skull.
De Jong dips into the shadows of jazz in album’s final moments, for the bleak solitude of "Purpose". Wind audibly brushes against the microphone as a piano traces some meandering chords, evoking a forlorn sense of resignation and acceptance. It is the sound of someone at the halfway point of their life, looking forward and backward. In that, it's a quiet return to 2003's The Lemon of Pink. IF is patient and spacious, suggesting that de Jong has found solitude, if not peace, between the strings of his cello.
