NEW MUSIC: Lost and Safe

Some people say that an artist can’t create his own meaning, that he can only combine pre-existing voices so that they blend and clash in a new way. This so-called “death of the author” is singularly dramatized in The Books’ third album, Lost and Safe, in which the North Adams, Mass. duo takes their signature cut-and-paste sound collage to a new level.

All of the songs on the beautifully composed album contain ‘quoted’ material of some sort—excerpts from television programs and radio plays, overheard conversation, and ambient noises are recombined and re-contextualized to take on new meaning, supplemented with vocals and an arsenal of instruments, home-made and otherwise.

In terms of spoken language, the dialogue between the quotation-sound-clips and the words or vocals they generate themselves takes on different forms. In “be good to them always,” there is a mirroring effect: the band’s vocals overlay the same lines spoken by various other voices in found audio clips. Recorded readings of “The Jabberwocky” and lines spoken in various languages are followed by vocals singing out-of-order lines from Carol’s poem in “vogt dig for kloppervok.” Some songs consist almost entirely of spoken clips, as in “it never changes to stop,” others draw out and re-map a story solely upon quoted material in “An Animated Description of Mr. Maps.”

The re-combinations and their accompanying music are, invariably, beautiful, if sometimes bizarre. Explication for the band’s technique can be found in one of their few songs with mostly original lyrics, “smells like content:” “when finally we opened the box, / we couldn’t find any rules / our heads were reeling with a glut of possibilities…but whither ever increasing faith / we decided to go ahead and just ignore them…so instead we went ahead / to fabricate a catalog / of unstable elements, and modicums / and particles / with non-zero total strangeness / for brief moments which amount / to nothing more than tiny fragments of a finger snap.”

These lines tersely describe the band’s ars poetica of sorts—to catalog and re-combine disparate particles and fragments of language into a synthetic whole. The cut-and-pasted audio material creates a surreal sort of ‘exquisite corpse’ effect, not so much relating an explicit story as exposing an unconscious mood or psychic backdrop. In extreme cases, their own lyrical contribution is literally reduced to mere finger-snapping, as in “it never changes to stop.”

The general feel of The Books’ sound-collages has changed from the past albums, for better or for worse. Whereas before the strings and instrumental sounds felt very present, and the idiosyncratic, folksy vocals made the songs feel very close and intimate, the new work with its euphoniously monotonic and often electronically-modulated vox feels much more distant. Instead of crooning into the listener’s ears, Lost and Safe seems to take a step back, de-personalizing their songs in what seems like a greater effort to synthesize the “collective unconscious” that their songs aim for with flat, unemotional singing sounding something like a glitchy Schneider TM remix of a Modest Mouse-The Shins hybrid.

The emotional high points of the album come through the recorded voices, which taken out of context, almost always become strangely profound. But this leads to the feeling that the songs are merely being overheard, that they are reporting something rather than making any statements—literally so in the case of “Venice,” a jokey play-by-play of an artist painting what seems to be an abstract crucifixion scene (complete with Italian voices and crowd noises.)

It’s debatable whether such a depersonalizing trend is a good thing, but the distancing and mellowing effect of the album seems consistent with the last lines of “smells like content:” “Expectation leads to disappointment. / If you don’t expect something big, huge, and exciting / usually uh, I don’t know, it’s just not as, yeah.” On this note, the Book’s newest album succeeds on their terms, in making a uniquely melodic socio-culturally synthesized soundscape—but don’t expect anything big, huge, and exciting.