The Books seem like a band of college professors. They make samples from fake old records and string them together over pensive guitar/cello duets. The result is an intriguing collage; sentences invented to sound like breathless 30′s radio dramas ruminate alongside false “Learn-Turkish-in-20-days” tapes. It can be a humbling babble. Words that weren’t meant to connect, color each other and form unique stories that neither could tell alone.
Take the jam “Tokyo” which charges forward (for the Books anyway) with a slappy beat and recordings from the Tokyo international airport. We hear a Japanese woman butcher an English sentence and then hear an American grandma render the language just as meaningless.
Meaningful.
But when the Books giggle a little too hard at their postmodern in-jokes, the songs go from insightful to insular. It’s a bit like the Flarf movement. Flarf poets take internet gibberish (spam, facebook status updates, google search bar auto-fills) and string them together as poetry. They claim that by repeating our internet actions they expose society’s reflection to itself. Sounds pretty good right? But when you get down to it, what sociological truth are they exposing exactly? That people can be inane on the internet? The Books can get caught in the same trap. They invent samples from imaginary newscasts, slap them together, and hope the combination alone is profound.
Then again, when you take an intense method approach to postmodern collage you’re bound to end up with a few clunkers.
But when the Books are cooking it’s something to behold. The cellist attacks his instrument and unrelated murmurs are transformed into heartbreaking realizations, epiphanies from voices that will never meet.
The Books play the Triple Door on November 24th
