Tag Team Concert Review: The Books
Warning: This entry is the second in a large string of upcoming tag team reviews (i.e. Frodo and I have been attending a ridiculous amount of shows recently). Consider yourselves warned! This particular show took us a while to ruminate on - we went to The Books at Neumos on April 26th before The Decemberists, but The Books was such an aural mind trip that it took longer to sink into our collective present consciousness. Meditate with us by focusing on the bump.
Frodo: If you ever took orchestra classes in high school you can relate to this. Remember there was always that one kid who could play all the instruments and was super good at each and every one and didn't even need to read the sheet music during concerts? I like to imagine that kid eventually being in a band like The Books. Truly self-sufficient off their art, The Books is a very unique ClickPop/Orchestral sound experience. It's hard to describe.
Caspian: They label themselves as being in the "Found Sound" genre, The Books' Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong thrive on building an atmosphere of samples and sparsely painting that sky with guitar and cello cirrus clouds. They merge their audio nearly perfectly with the images spewing forth from their video projector creating a truly multimedia experience. On "Smells Like Content" Zammuto sang a very complex lyric structure and had the lyrics fly by simultaneously for us all to read along. It seems blasé recounting it, but it was one of the most hypnotizing performances I've ever witnessed.
Frodo: It really was quite the experience. I had been listening to The Books' The Lemon of Pink for a while and got really used to the various sounds in the album. They use an impressive amount of samples, mainly voices culled from documentaries and 1970s movies, and for some odd reason I had formulated what these voices would look like in my mind. Seeing the video of where these samples actually came from was an amazing experience, and for the most part I was right on the money imagining their origins. Go me!
Caspian: By far the best moment of the evening was seeing the live execution of “Take Time”. Seeing all the video clips from which they extracted the joyful sample bursts was nothing short of incredible. The laughing bits in the song, turns out, were actually three African women joking about male impotence. As innovative as The Books are on tape, they are genuinely a treat for all the senses in concert (if you count the scent of the Pyramid Ale I was sipping on meeting the olfactory requirement).
What say you?!