Review: The Books – The Way Out

I think it’s safe to say that the decline and fall of sample-oriented music started in 2000 with The Avalanches’ masterpiece Since I Left You. The Avalanches so deftly created new music from nothing but a seemingly endless sea of samples that it was hard to imagine another music act beating them at their game. Even veteran samplers such as DJ Shadow and RJD2 seemed to stop trying. There’s an element of The Avalanches’ shtick in The Books’ new album The Way Out, though. While The Books use a fair amount of live instrumentation, they also make heavy use of the sort of quirky, out-of-context vocal samples that pervaded tracks like “Frontier Psychiatrist.” The samples are pretty entertaining, but the gimmick would get old pretty fast if there weren’t some solid songs underneath the calculated craziness. Luckily, there are.

Nowhere is the entertainment value of the samples higher than in the album’s fourth track, “A Cold Freezin’ Night.” Through the course of this song we hear a child talk about torturing and killing some unknown antagonist. It’s like a Muppet Babies version of the classic Wu-Tang Clan skit. It would be pretty disturbing without the quirky avant-jazz instrumentation surrounding it, but as part of the song it’s mostly just funny.

Elsewhere, the instrumentation can get kind of grating, and when that happens the samples tend to follow suit. “I Am Who I Am” is not particularly interesting, and gives the worrying impression that the rest of the album is going to follow the same formula of throwaway instrumentals coupled with increasingly irritating samples. Luckily, the album then takes a turn for the mellower with “Chain of Missing Links,” and The Books prove that they can make a song that has merits outside of sheer novelty value.

The Books are not The Avalanches. They are able to write some pretty decent songs when they’re not using samples as a crutch, and even when they are it’s still pretty entertaining. There are undoubtedly people who will listen to a few of their singles and write them off as a novelty act, and to an extent that’s perfectly valid. Listening to The Way Out all the way through, though, it is apparent that there are talented musicians behind the quirkiness. It’s not a perfect album by any means, but it’s one of the more interesting ones to come out this year.

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About the Author

Jeremy Clymer lives in Michigan with his wife and kid. He shoots his writings out into the ethers of the Internet in the hopes that someone will pick up on his transmissions and shower him with money and/or praise.

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