10 of 2010 (#9): The Books – The Way Out

July saw the welcome return of New York City duo Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong, with their fourth album as The Books, and their first since 2005’s widely acclaimed Lost and Safe. The five-year gap indicates the dedicated work that went into the record. Their approach, self-described as collage, marries a wide range of live instrumentation – guitar, bass, strings, brass, organ and percussion – with scattershot IDM beats and a virtuosic deployment of a wealth of spoken-word samples.

Tracks such as Chain of Missing Links recall the melancholy, narcotic haze of earlier work, with Zammuto’s soft vocals mouthed against a backdrop of muted bass and drum patterns that recalls Tortoise et al. But as Paul de Jong tells us, The Way Out is also a departure of sorts: "[The Books] needed to get away from what we knew of ourselves without denying who we are. One of the first things we decided to do was to include much more up-tempo tracks.” Thus, the album features hyperactive, absurdly frantic pieces like A Cold Freezin’ Night, which showcases The Books' painstaking rearrangement of spoken-word samples to full effect. “I’ve taken sampling to places where I’ve never been able to go in previous records,” de Jong explains.

A mass of contradictions, The Way Out is both playfully ironic and disarmingly sincere, warm yet clinical, with moods that swing between a mournful nostalgia and frenzied humour; it’s the record’s consistency of technical approach that meshes the whole together. 2010 may not have been a great year for hip-hop by narrow definitions, but along with Flying Lotus, The Books produced work which draws upon that genre’s basic precepts to produce something that sounded genuinely fresh.