FTR

For the Record

Out Hud

Let Us Never Speak Of It Again

(Kranky)

There are three worthwhile songs on Let Us Never Speak of It Again. This is a surprise because S.T.R.E.E.T.D.A.D., Out Hud's previous effort, was a sprawling, gritty mess of ebullient strings and electronic beats that was both weirdly danceable and at home next to Kranky label-mates Godspeed You! Black Emperor's better work. Here they've almost entirely abandoned that sound, instead embracing the 80s dance club aesthetic of drum machines, synthesizers and diva-type vocals. This shift, if done well, could have produced an album to stand next to S.T.R.E.E.T.D.A.D. But Out Hud aren't up to the task. Where they succeed, the results are as good as anything else being made today, but those moments are too scarce to carry the album.

From the sea of duds, two truly excellent dance songs emerge on Let Us Never Speak of it Again. The first shows Out Hud successfully bridging their old sound and new; the other, one hopes, points out the direction the band will go in the future. "How Long," the former, is the best track on the album. After a dour and plodding intro, the song suddenly and exquisitely snaps into place. The shuffling beat and slap-bass line are brimming with vitality and the awesomely bratty vocals are pushed to the front of the mix. Topping it off are some pummeling, dirty synthesizers that keep the sonic palate interesting. Part of "How Long"'s charm is its energy of actually sounding like a band, keeping it well away from stale dance music territory.

The second standout is the opener, "It's For You," which shows Out Hud nailing the 80s sound that they fail to get results from elsewhere on the album. The beat is crisp and minimal and serves as the ideal backbone to the spare keyboard and occasional guitar that rest on top of it. But all that would be a waste if they hadn't given the dynamics of the song the immaculate attention that they have. The layers build up and drop out just when they should and the song's few parts are seamlessly juggled, never letting any one sit still for too long.

A third and lesser highlight has Out Hud trying out a sound new to them. "The Stoked American," in contrast to the backwards-looking nature of the rest of the album, is refreshingly innovative and would find a happy home away from the dance floor. A chiming thumb piano serves as the unifying medium that allows a frenetic, Aphex Twin-style beat to exist alongside a slow moving bass line and a languid synthesizer. The unexpected match-up of sounds works surprisingly well. The cherry on top is a strangely wistful guitar that appears briefly about halfway through the song and lends the track a welcome emotional weight.

But then there's the rest of the album. The overall feeling is that something is missing, that something is failing to give these songs the cohesion they need to be functional. "One Life to Leave," incomprehensibly the single, is a confused smear of dance music tropes with a shitty bass line. "Dear Mr. Bush, There Are Over 100 Words for Shit and Only 1 for Music. Fuck You, Out Hud" is longer than its title and epically boring, a skeleton of what Out Hud used to be. Fuck you, Out Hud, indeed.

The months spent mixing Let Us Never Speak of It Again that its press release brags about seem to be indicative of an inability to get incomplete songs to sound good. The few tracks where Out Hud gets it right are really irresistible. But in the end it's hard not to hear a band falling back on clichés to pad out what is ultimately an underdeveloped and uninteresting album.

-Rafael Spielman

The Books

Lost And Safe

(Tomlab)

With all musical trends, even the most obscure, it often isn't long before the enthusiasm and vibrancy of the new develops a certain sickly pallor of the outmoded. Arguably, the label "experimental" spans far too great a musical range to offer a set of overused ingredients ripe for derision. After all, shouldn't a genre of music that inherently defies genre be exempt from going stale? And yet already the typical tongue twisters of experimental music-be it ambient-electronic-neo-folk or technical-instrumental-noise-seem all too familiar. Which is why it is all the more impressive that, with the quirky, the abstract, and the just barely inaccessible increasingly appreciated, the Books continue to stand in a genre all their own with the release of their third album, Lost and Safe.

Information about the band seems as sparse and bare-boned as much of the quietly artful musical collage for which they have been acclaimed. It is known they are a duo-Nick Zammuto, guitarist, and cellist Paul de Jong-based in Massachusetts. Apart from these few fragmented details and the reference points of their two previous albums, 2002's Thought for Food and 2003's The Lemon of Pink, their third effort appears to materialize completely removed from the personal history of the pair or their expanding discography. One might expect this to alienate the listener from their work, injecting into the Books' musical equation that necessary experimental mystique. However, each song on Lost and Safe-a smartly computer-arranged musical vignette of guitar, banjo, violin and the band's trademark sound-sampling-seems far more cozily, familiarly DIY than impenetrably foreign. Perhaps it is the Books' loving and obsessive accumulation of thrift-store cassette tapes from which they gather their sound bites (which range from a gentleman's stately reading of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" on "Vogt Dig for Kloppervok" to a narration of an artist painting for an audience in "Venice"). Or it could be their use of makeshift instruments-tuned plastic drain pipes and a metal filing cabinet installed with sub-woofers-in the bedroom studio of an old Victorian house. Regardless, on their newest album the Books captivate and beguile with sonic craftsmanship and pop sensibility. Their songs remain independent of any particular time or narrative, but contain all the warmth and whimsical invention of a storybook.

But in leaning toward a more accessible pop sound than on their previous two records, it could be argued that the Books push their sound into overly familiar terrain. While the inclusion of far more live vocals from Zammuto juxtaposed with sampling certainly gives the songs a more hummable character, his voice is too sanitized and pleasant-a buttery drone too innocuous to carry the weight of the music. But for his smooth assimilation into the Books' well-orchestrated bricolage and curiously ambiguous lyrics, Zammuto deserves credit. On "Be Good to them Always," Zammuto half-sings, half-speaks along with his samples. Zammuto's voice as the new axis for the band's work, as well as increased use of clicking, percussive electric guitar over strings, has its advantages. It offers standout tracks like the pretty, soft melancholy of "Twelve Fold Chain" and the perfect, hovering minimalism of the album's opener "A Little Longing Goes a Long Way." Nevertheless, having cultivated such praise for their previous two albums, at times Lost and Safe risks sacrificing the band's simultaneously scattered and measured compositions. On "Smells Like Content," the familiar Books' background of rolling guitar clicks is transformed by Zammuto's sung melody into something too disappointingly familiar.

Nevertheless, whilst veering dangerously close to the classifiable but still continuing to achieve novelty with such an overused medium as the sound sample, the Books spare themselves ties to any particular musical movement or influence. With Lost and Safe, the curiosity-shop inventiveness of their music is still very much in evidence. However, as with all music that tends toward the ambiguous, complex and unfamiliar, we expect to be absorbed, immersed, and transported. It would be nice to speculate that by adopting a poppier sensibility, perhaps the Books attempt to pick apart our sense of the familiar. Or maybe it is the album's title that inevitably offers the most plausible verdict: in skating a little closer to the safe, it is the Books' unique and valuable niche that is most at risk of being lost.

-Sarah Gordon

Take Me Out

Tuesday, April 12

Greg Davis + Keith Fullerton Whitman + Bird Show. White Electric, 711 Westminster St., 7:30 pm, $8.

The Locust + Daughters + Read Yellow.

The Living Room, Rathbone Street, 8pm.

On Tuesday, you have two choices. You will love life, or you will love death. You will scrawl angular forms into your skin or you will drape yourself in a poncho-hoodie. You will throw fists or you will hold hands. The Locust and local destroyers Daughters handle the violence, blasting minute-long paroxysms of noise that are sufficiently damaged, but not by art. On the other side of the highway, some inimitable dudes-Greg Davis, Keith Fullerton Whitman-press buttons on their computers, which then produce what the kids are calling "bucolic soundscapes." Why? Because this is what dudes do, nowadays.

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