Hi everybody! ‘Sup? Nm, u? So this is a review of the new album from The Books, The Way Out. I’m giving the record 85/100, which is actually a wonderful rating, but unfortunately it is doubtful that this rating will sway anybody one way or the other; this is because The Books are generally polarizing. You like them or you don’t. If you have never listened to them, here is a quick quiz:

Do you like any of the following: tape collages, cello, weird beats and old Casio keyboard samples, voices that are played backward, sped up and down, or otherwise garbled, snippets of old movies or ‘80s R&B cassettes, random repeating phrases, or “Revolution 9” off the White Album? If you answered yes to three or more of these things, then you will almost certainly enjoy the Books. They formed in 1999, and they consist of one Nick Zammuto (guitars, vocals) and one Paul de Jong (cello). You can check out their video for first single “A Cold Freezing Night” here. They do not seem to conform to any existing music genre; their songs are decoupaged, at once fractured and harmonious, combining electro and folk elements with morsels of borrowed vocals and sounds. On The Way Out, it’s like someone put a television, a radio, an encyclopedia, and a box of old records in a blender, pressed ‘pulsate,’ and the resulting smoothie actually ended up tasting pretty good.

This is their fourth record, after 2005’s Lost and Safe, and it sounds more structured, both thematically and in terms of song configuration. The perennially beautiful cello and guitar are still there, and the tracks, despite their inherent weirdness, still have crescendos and verse-chorus-verses that mimic the structure of pop songs. Three of them even have fully fleshed out vocals and almost no clutter: the minimalist “We Bought The Flood,” “All You Need Is A Wall,” a breathily-sung, simple acoustic lament, and “Free Translator,” a rambling folky tune with lyrics like, “Count your dollar, only one/Count it again/One, one, one.” It’s funny that a perfectly normal and lovely folk song is can sound so shocking and different on a Books album.

Elsewhere, there’s a shitload of food for thought, which is what The Books do best—after all, there’s always a story behind the snippet. Take “Thirty Incoming,” full of quavering cello and walloping tom-tom drums, sprinkled with clips of a man leaving dozens of answering machine messages for a woman named Mary. Who’s the guy? Who is Mary? Where did those lovely soaring chorus vocals come from? On “Group Autogenics I,” a man and woman with implausibly soothing voices offer the listener New Age nuggets like “Your body is now a glass container,” and “The deeper you go, the deeper you go” over gently plucked strings. Anecdotes abound. The Books explained on their blog that the brother-sister argument on “A Cold Freezin’ Night” was captured on a Talkboy tape recorder; at one point in the song, the brother tells his sister in an agitated little-kid voice that “I can kill you with a rifle, with a shotgun, any way I want to!” It’s all very weird, yet deeply compelling.

My favorite track is “The Story Of Hip-Hop,” which combines a narrator’s storytelling (“Listen carefully/I want to tell you a story…”) with ambient noise and a beat that is part arrhythmic and part A Tribe Called Quest. Little fragments of actual old-school hip hop show up—horn blasts, hi-hat, scratching—so even though the song doesn’t fit into the genre, it still has a hint of the vibe. Listening to The Books is an intellectual exercise as much as an auditory one. Take “I Am Who I Am,” a whirring techno-ish collage in which a man who sounds like a Southern politician screams “I am who I am, I am what I am, I will be what I will be,” which with further research turns out to be the meaning of the Hebrew name for God. None of the snippets are ever random, and this is evident when you consider the little themes that run through the album like dozens of threads: ideas about logic and mathematics, relationships, religion. “Beautiful People,” a track with vocals from a Christian chorus group, sums all this up nicely with lyrics like, “Behold the finite set of thirteen convex figure/The irrational sine versus tangent forty-five/And we genuflect before pure abstraction.”

So while The Books are a love-it-or-hate-it experience, it wouldn’t be unwise to give The Way Out a listen. Think of it like reading an unfamiliar, but highly recommended book—maybe it’s not your cup of tea, but you just might end up learning something.

Track List:
1. Group Autogenics I
2. IDKT
3. I Didn’t Know That
4. A Cold Freezin’ Night
5. Beautiful People
6. I Am Who I Am
7. Chain Of Missing Links
8. All You Need Is A Wall
9. Thirty Incoming
10. A Wonderful Phrase By Gandhi
11. We Bought The Flood
12. The Story Of Hip-Hop
13. Free Translator
14. Group Autogenics II