The Books: Cold Freezin’ Night

Experimental musical duo The Books are highly thoughtful and empathic scavengers and re-interpreters who’ve been surprising and delighting audiences for over a decade now. Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto’s songs –a strange melange of acoustic melodies (cello, guitar, banjo, etc.) spliced together with an ever-expanding library of “found sounds”– are dense with samples lifted from home recording cassettes plundered from thrift stores, as well as bootlegged video tapes. They also cut and paste sounds recorded from children’s toys and random non-musical objects to create looping percussive beds. The resulting music is off-kilter yet tightly controlled, and often unexpectedly danceable.

This chaos-wrangling, ephemera-pillaging style is well-represented visually by the music video for “Cold Freezin’ Night”, a weird 80s schoolyard disco taunt off their latest album, The Way Out:


via Dustykins once again. (Girl, you really gotta start blogging for us!)

3 Responses to “The Books: Cold Freezin’ Night”

  1. Tweets that mention Coilhouse » Blog Archive » The Books: Cold Freezin’ Night -- Topsy.com Says:

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by coilhouse, Justin Ashworth. Justin Ashworth said: RT @coilhouse: New blog post: The Books: Cold Freezin' Night http://coilhouse.net/2010/11/the-books-cold-freezin-night/ […]

  2. Ben Morris Says:

    I love the Books. I prefer Thought for Food and the Lemon of Pink over the two more recent albums but they are all good.

  3. Nadya Says:

    “Oh, look at Meredith, she’s an idiot. Ha ha ha.”

    LOL!