Being and Rhyme

The Books : Lost and Safe
Since being death-marched through Victorian literature – the poems of the Brownings, Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, et al coming one after another, endlessly, like footsteps composing a lit student's Trail of Tears – I've been on holiday from proper poetry. I've gradually forgotten how much depends on a red wheel barrow and for whom the caged bird sings. In the place of such ephemera I now concern myself with how to dismantle atomic bombs, among other things.

Most often, when I choose to think about it, I like that pop and indie rock are able to convey most of the ideas and emotions of traditional poetic forms without needing a dictionary, a Bible, a slide-rule and a copy of Aesop to understand what the hell is going on.

What I miss is the sense of historical context poetry often brings, as well as the meditation and variations on classical forms. I miss the layers of meaning.

When something manages to bridge that chasm, to be both contemporary and historically-minded, both allusive and accessible, the effect is jarring. Also a little frustrating. I wonder why everything can't be like this thing here, whatever it is.

Listening to The Books creates that effect.

Their latest album, Lost and Safe is lots of things at once. Found sounds intermingle with banjos, industrial percussion, Nick Zammuto's half-spoken lyrics, big ideas, nonsense poetry, indecisive found soliloquies, and enough staccato mandolin to force Captain Corelli's unconditional surrender.

[When I can't properly describe something, I make lists. And jokes.]

The paradox being that the dissonance somehow seems to create harmony. Each track is viscerally magnetic and still earnestly contemplative.

[Somehow. Whatever that means. Maybe I should try to say something knowing and profound about the process itself]

Found voices and sounds are usually a tough sell. Above the technical difficulty of making the voice of a parliamentarian mesh with the clanking of dishes and the broadcast of an all-points-bulletin, the artist assumes the added difficulty of not looking like a self-indulgent prick.

On Lost and Safe, The Books manage to explore their environment and contemplate the art of sound without being narcissistic or masturbatory.

[Somehow. I guess. Maybe this will be easier if I go track by track].

The album is worth buying just for “Vogt Dig for Kloppervok”, which sounds wet like a rain shower and rearranges lines from Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky (which feels damp itself) to create a thoughtful meditation on aggression.

On “Be Good to Them Always”, Zammuto's moan comes in alone initially before sublimating quietly beneath found voices, turning declarative statements about hardship into plaintive cries. Mimicry.

The glitchy beats pound out irregularly, like the clop of cavalry, but not boldly riding or well; rather, with uncertainty and trepidation.

Zammuto's voice slowly drowns out as the tone turns increasingly psychoanalytical and condemnatory, before a found voice returns to the same statement Zammuto made initially:

"You know, I simply cannot understand people / Oh how sadly we mortals are deceived by our imagination."

The same words, in a different context, at the beginning and end respectively, have vastly different meanings. The voices are now barely audible over the march, as though we as humans can speak to our symptoms, but are blind to the underlying disease. And before we can identify it, life has already moved on. This feeling of obscured vision--of partial sight and missed opportunities--resurfaces throughout Lost and Safe.

“Smells Like Content" broods over another pervasive motif, The Books' seeming dissatisfaction with modernity and the answers it offers. There are no found voices until the last twenty seconds, but swells with rolling guitar; a simple, grungy percussion loop and Zammuto's vaguely existential ruminations.

"Most of all, the world was a place where reports of holes were described / within an overarching paradigm of clarity and accuracy / the context of which makes possible an underlying sense of the way it all fits together / despite our collective tendency not to conceive of it as such."

Zammuto then contradicts himself with an identical rhyme scheme. And then again. Once the found voice returns, its affected knowledge is unconvincing even to itself:

"Expectation leads to disappointment / If you don't expect something big, huge and exciting / usually, um I don't know it's just not as . . ."

The voice trails off.

In the context The Books have created, conventional wisdom seems as ineffectual as nihilism. Traditional authority is meaningless and the individual is unable to make up the gap.

[Somehow. Whatever that means].

If any of this sounds at all intriguing, Lost and Safe is probably the best place to start investigating The Books' sound. Of their three albums, it relies least on found sounds and voices, weaving what samples there are into careful balance with singer Nick Zammuto's voice.

It's storytelling by committee and of all the found voices on the album, perhaps the most important is the listener's. The result is immediately accessible and listenable, but as successive plays reveal new layers and details, it becomes more unsettling, perhaps as we realize that The Books have left one part of the composition for us to fill in ourselves.

On Lost and Safe, The Books poke at big ideas, but offer no theses. They seem content to leave those to us. Dispassionate analysis is always easier than contemplation and self-reflection. Maybe that's why Lost and Safe has been so tough to review. Any critique of Lost and Safe reflects back on the listener. That's an uncomfortable spot, but it's probably why I find myself replaying it compulsively.

[Alright, that wasn't bad, now just tie it back in]

Most days the line delineating pop from literary poetry – contemporary and throughout time – seems sharp and exact. Then, some days, I hear a band like The Books and suddenly I'm no longer sure. Those days feel important.

[A slightly more self-loathing version will appear in this week's Reader]