BOOKS - Lost And Safe

The music of the Books is a puzzle that breaks apart and reassembles with every listen. The only certainty is its origin: the American folk-country and bluegrass tradition; everything else is a shredding of that tradition into a mass of sonic offal, which only occasionally lets a semblance of "song-form" flash through. The tools of the trade for the American-Dutch duo made up of Nick Zammuto Willscher and Paul De Jong are, on one hand, the cut-and-paste scissors that devour sounds and tear them to pieces, and on the other, the "glue" — a collection of samples and found sound (the "library" from which they take their name) — used to build an utterly original musical collage. Like any self-respecting puzzle, theirs demands patience, curiosity and a keen eye, but it never fails to reward the listener in the end.

If their debut "Thought For Food" (2002) had stunned the world, prompting cries of a "folktronica" miracle, the follow-up "The Lemon Of Pink" cemented the group's reputation with its wonderfully odd cut-up rewriting of Japanese history. Now, "Lost And Safe" arrives as the definitive refinement of an experiment born almost as a game, which has since become one of the most talked-about cases on the indie scene of recent years.

Having abandoned their chilly North Adams apartment-studio for a cozier Victorian house, still in Massachusetts, the two folktronica pioneers continue their work of hybridizing traditional acoustic instruments (cello, guitar, mandolin, banjo) with an assortment of electronic gadgetry; on top of that, "Lost And Safe" incorporates a new set of sounds and instrumental treatments, including a vintage keyboard (salvaged from a basement in the Netherlands and then restored) and homemade electroacoustic recordings. Compared to the past, the duo pushes harder on integrating original lyrics with samples, trying to shape something closer to the idea of a "song" and to showcase Zammuto's progress as a vocalist. The result is eleven tracks that, while losing a bit of the old ingenuity and unpredictability, still manage to keep fresh a formula that, by its third outing, risked showing signs of wear.

What remains, above all, is that subtle irony that has always kept the pair from tipping over into the cerebral posturing of (musical) morgue dissectors. So the tribute to "Venice", complete with stolen Italian phrases ("così, più in là"), plays out as a grotesquely exotic souvenir, built around an asynchronous voice-music dialogue, warmed by sampled beats and applause; the lively portrait of the enigmatic Mr. Maps is rendered surreal by a percussive commotion ("An animated description of Mr. Maps"); while in "If Not Now, Whenever" it's actually a ringing telephone that "counterpoints" guitar and voices in a delightful Dadaist miniature.

At other times the Books sound like a glitch version of Simon & Garfunkel. Such is the case with "Smells Like Content", a study in stripping an acoustic serenade down to a mere translucent sliver of harmonic cartilage, or with the closing "Twelve Fold Chain", a hushed ballad for delicate strings, lo-fi crackle and increasingly listless chords, which disintegrate completely by the end. In their more contemplative moments, the duo retreats into a sleepwalker's ambient music, sublimated on the opening "A Little Longing Goes Away": a handful of chords sketching an ethereal watercolor, whispers, hums, faint dissonances rippling the background in the distance — essentially a country ballad vivisected and decomposed.

This penchant for hushed, almost chamber-like sonorities returns on "Vogt Dig For Kloppervok", where a string intro dissolves into an assortment of glitch effects, with a guitar arpeggio trying to hold some kind of course amid a whirl of treated voices, ticking percussion, and doors opening and closing; or again on "It Never Changes To Stop", the usual spoken-word delivery, this time slightly more "hysterical", over an ocean of strings, with the banjo keeping time. The Books' scissors manage to shred even a would-be rap track ("Be Good To Them Always"), turning it into a slow-motion video game of sampled voices, skittering percussion and dizzying keyboards; and the lyrics are no less mocking: "Oh how sadly we mortals are deceived by our own imagination", goes one line.

By the end of the record, you're left with the feeling of having lived through a long stream of consciousness, by turns earnest and purely mocking. It's a certainly intriguing exercise in intellectual stimulation, though occasionally undermined by a touch too much mannerism. The duo's bag of tricks remains vast, but it may be starting to suffer from the lack of a more properly "musical" scaffolding. Paradoxically, the very attempt to craft an album of "songs", a kind of singer-songwriter approach sui generis, is the record's least successful aspect. But deep down — the Books seem to be telling us — it's just music to listen to so you can feel safe when you're lost. Or vice versa.

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30/04/2026