#179 The Books - The Way Out

The last Books album I heard was good enough to also check out their even-newer one too.

Man, its albums like this that make this project tough. So, in case you're wondering, yeah, it still sounds roughly like a Books album. But it also has a really different feel than their other ones - I wonder if I am unfairly hard on them for sounding samey just because they sound so different than anyone else.

On this, their forth album, they focus on samples from a variety of self-help recordings: plenty of calm people providing you with metaphors for wholeness and oneness, promising you a better you. At times its really affecting, when all the synths and beats and cuts and chops really come together. Other times its all a bit gimmicky (lead single Cold Freezin' Night doesn't do anything for me). Sometimes its both: I Am Who I Am actually really rocks, and The Story of Hip Hop somehow transcends its "sampling a children's story about a rabbit that just happens to be named hip hop" gimmick to be one of the best songs on the album.

I'm torn. The way The Books use these samples, they're not quite mocking them, but they're not quite respecting them. At first its just background noise, the random chatter of any Books record, but then the themes return and return and work their way into you, and the effect isn't quite funny, and it isn't quite therapeutic. Its a collage of people's ways of dealing with their weakness, and none of them are right or wrong, though none of them sound like the answer, I'm left feeling hollow but connected.

Its kind of an unpleasant listen - it reminds me of a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, where its heavy or harrowing or otherwise difficult, and you're glad that you've experienced it, and glad it's over. I don't know how many more turns it will get, but with themes as complex as these, and some of the better, more experimental compositions the books have attempted, it seems appropriate to land at about a 4/5