The Books - The Lemon Of Pink

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5...according to our Clinton on Thu 28 Dec, 2006.

Anyway on with the show. First up we have a very interesting CD by The Books. Now 'original' is not a word I'd use about many of today's pop acts but this is one CD that's worthy of the word. Its cut up acoustic weird sounding music with snatches of vocals, odd sounding voices and some really lovely cello's. I think this will appeal to lots of people; those who like lo-fi acoustic folky stuff, those with an interest in electronics and those into the strung out near psychedelic folk of Cerberus Shoal and their like. A really impressive album.

In 2002, The Books surprised everyone, including themselves, with their debut release "Thought for Food". Through some sort of backward circuitous motion it found wide acclaim in small circles across the globe, ending up on many end-of-year Top 10 lists.

Confounded reviewers attempted to categorize The Books' music as electro-acoustic sound collage, laptop, glitch, folktronica, cut-up indie bluegrass etcetera, but we prefer to think of it as blipworld / fakegrass / speedblues / chamberclick / eccentrock / country&eastern / glitch postanything music with samples. Time will tell. It has been described as music that comes from everywhere yet remains warmly personal and intimate, often like a soundtrack, sometimes referring to a particular place or city, sometimes to a time in life. Critics agreed that it found a compelling balance between instrumental innovation, silence and space, and between humor and absurdity. Listeners agreed that it made them think, and feel strangely good.

This year, The Books sally forth with their second full-length album "The Lemon Of Pink". Unlike "Thought for Food", which was composed on-and-off over several years across several cities and mountain villages, "The Lemon Of Pink" was composed more or less continuously under one old roof in the beautiful post-industrial hamlet of North Adams, Massachusetts.

As our friend, Jorge Just, described it in a single sentence: "If you emptied 50 jigsaw puzzles onto your kitchen table, blindfolded yourself and put all of the pieces together by faith and instinct, sweating over the smoothness of each connection, working at it and working at it until finally you were finished, confident that each piece was precisely where it was meant to be, and after all that effort, you took a deep breath, removed your blindfold, looked at your work and saw something new, something inexplicable and strange and overwhelmingly comforting, something that felt exactly, impossibly, right, then you would have The Books."

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