Review Summary: The Books' debut may come off as a little forced, but you can't fault them for not trying.
With
Thought for Food, experimental duo The Books introduced a novel idea that wasn't exactly fleshed-out (this idea being mixing random vocal snippets with introspective, string-injected indie pop), leading to a disjointed but cleverly idiosyncratic listen, and one that endeared so many fans of weirded-out indie pop. In terms of "intelligent" music, the album has everything: it's self-aware (the constant references to aleatoric music on "Read, Eat, Sleep" (which, in themselves, give an aleatoric value to the song)), funny (the strange conversations in "Contempt" (taken from the 1963 film of the same name)), and just the tiniest bit condescending (the incessant babble of a New York-accented woman on "Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again"). The Books indeed know what they're doing here, but that doesn't stop its less successful experiments from coming off as self-indulgent, pompous, and a little bit boring.
Thought For Food starts out on the right foot: "Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again" cleverly places its seemingly random sound effects and vocal clips in a manner so that they feel systematically allotted alongside the music, rather than taking pride in the hit-and-miss aleatoric fashion the group would seem to represent. When the aforementioned babbler is introduced, it takes on a hilarity after her meaningless monologues stretches into the 30-second mark (note: a lot longer than it seems), as if The Books have met this woman and are simply trying to convince you how annoying she is.
Along with "Enjoy Your Worries", the album's biggest successes lie in the reflective "Motherless Bastard" and the complicated-yet-catchy "Getting the Done Job". The former introduces itself via a recorded conversation between a little girl looking for her parents and an old man who seems to flatly refuse her (Girl: "Mommy Daddy! Mommy Daddy! Mom? Dad?" Old Man: "You have no mother or father.") The music that follows is simple and beautiful (and, perhaps most significantly, free of the vocal samples the duo is so well-known for). "Getting the Done Job" starts out almost like an ambient track but about halfway in gives way to an irregular pattern played on strings and guitar and backed up by voices chanting nonsensical lyrics ("Ear to the ground / I sift through piles of fallen letters / Copying keys, roll down my sleeves / A part of the hanging garden of the city / Downtown the sounds of single people doing nothing").
Too often, though, the group go for broke and assume the interest of the listener in a few humdrum concepts. Ever want to hear what a Strauss piece would sound like echoed and layered upon itself? Probably not, but you get it here on "Excess Straussess" anyway. Interested in checking out what high-speed bass sounds like combined with (among others) high-frequency buzzing, samples of someone making strange throat noises, and tapping noises? I wouldn't hope so, but "Mikey Bass" provides it nonetheless. By all means, there are certain listeners who will take a liking to these strange concepts and ideas being thrown around, but the rest of us will be impatiently waiting, wondering when the "real music" will start.
So perhaps the reason that more musical, less sample-based tracks like "Motherless Bastard" and "Getting the Done Job" succeed is the same reason that the duo's second album,
The Lemon of Pink, feels more complete and less forced. As it stands,
Thought For Food is an album full of interesting experiments, both failed ("Contempt", "Mikey Bass") and successful ("Motherless Bastard", "Getting the Done Job") that slightly misses the mark, and simply isn't worth the time of sifting through the good and the bad. But hey, at least they tried.
