 | Tracklist:
1. Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them
Again
2. Read, Eat, Sleep
3. All Bad Ends All
4. Contempt
5. All Our Base Are Belong to Them
6. Thankyoubranch
7. Motherless Bastard
8. Mikey Bass
9. Excess Strauses
10. Getting the Done Job
11. A Dead Fish Gains the Power of Observation
12. Deafkids
Release Date: 2002 | |
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On 1 Lists
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| Summary: soundtrack of barbecues and new razor spark scooters |
0 of 1 thought this review was well written
Seven tracks into Thought for Food, the Books suddenly and sharply bring into focus the nature of the thought. The sample that leads into the “Motherless Bastard,” of a conversation between an infant and a kind-of creepy-then-beguiling older man over the whereabouts of her folks, is poignantly sad and pretty funny, one of the few instances where a sample plays unaccompanied. At once, it’s uncomfortably loud and close, mingling into a pastel of hushed voices, and the pay-off leads instantly into a Southern coat of velvety guitar chords while a backing beat stymies the pace. And whilst we all laugh to ourselves, chuckle slightly at a joke that never really gets old, the Books go back to business, creating a vibe of Southern-style community and shared memories.
There-in lies the key appeal of Thought for Food, taking portraits of every day life (news bites, movie quotes, radio lectures, fly-on-the-wall conversations, or in this case, an accidental conversation caught on tape at the Aquarium of the Pacific) and blends them into folk deeply rooted in Americana and a blend of European tropes, taking elements of modern trance and instrumental hip-hop to establish an identity largely their own, a perfect soundtrack that bleeds into the background. Which makes the Books’ emotionally resonant sense of camaraderie even more palpable, because Thought For Food has a clear-eyed focus from the outside looking in, regarding the spoken word elements of the composition with as careful an eye as they do their instruments.
Thought For Food studies the boundaries before flying over them, none so much as opener “Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again.” Duo Paul De Jong and Nick Zammuto suck the air out from between the layers, framing carefully modulated acoustic guitars that push, taut and twang a montage of TV broadcasts. An extended clip, of a woman on the subject of being harassed, becomes nearly comedic as it plays out but the Books recognize the moment and seize it, understanding and underlining our dulled emotion to media violence and anguish. Thought for Food is by no means a concept record or any serious study of society, but the subtle strains it weaves into the fabric give a lasting quality to artfully and many times playfully constructed songs.
Which is still nothing to say about the creativity of the selected samples, from bird caws to various groups of laughter, or the general sense of knowing cleverness distilled by good-natured well-being, in tone and spirit ("All Our Base Belong To Them" is a song title). And then there's the underlining personal factors of an album like this one. Between all the talk of the album as a composition and not simply brilliantly layered parts, the Books create the kind of album you remember hearing for the first time (myself over two years ago, though I wouldn’t know it until recently). The spontaneous conversations (meditations on outer beauty and aleatoric music and a dead fish gaining the power of observation) turn out to be the most clever trick, and they feel so deeply rooted in daily routine and the grind of machines that you might as well be hearing people across the country listening to the same thing.
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