The Books

Tuesday, November 2 • Doors 7pm • Show 8pm • $20 Flat • All Ages • $2 Minor Surcharge • Buy Tickets

w/ The Black Heart Procession

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The Books emerged in June 2002 with the release of their first album Thought for Food, after two years of working on and off in makeshift studios in New York, Los Angeles, Andover MA, and Hot Springs NC. To The Books’ total surprise the album received rave reviews throughout the independent music community and worldwide press. Though The Books are hard to categorize they are often pressed in interviews to categorize themselves. It took them almost as long as the making of their album to come up with this remotely suitable answer: blipworld / fakegrass / speedblues / chamberclick / eccentrock / country&eastern / glitch post-anything music with samples, closely followed by “food band.”

In late 2002 The Books took up residence in the quiet post-industrial hamlet of North Adams, MA and began carving out a new album, which was released as The Lemon of Pink again to worldwide acclaim. The main difference from Thought for Food is its greater coherence and more intimate character, due chiefly to the fact that the entire album was composed in a tiny pantry adjoining the kitchen of their apartment over a continuous period of six months. Immediately after completing The Lemon of Pink, The Books created their website (www.thebooksmusic.com) and rehearsed a one-off show which was performed at the Third Coast Audio Festival in Chicago before – again to their great surprise – a very enthusiastic audience. At that time they also collaborated with veteran radio maker Gregory Whitehead on the 90-minute radio play “The Loneliest Road,” commissioned by BBC3, which went on to win the Sony Academy Gold Award in the drama category.

Aside from their slowly developing vocal and instrumental skills, their insane library of recorded sound samples has been expanded to include a quickly growing collection of video samples which they intend to use both on stage and for installations and movies of a more permanent nature. Add to that machines which rhythmically blow giant smoke rings and a rattling filing cabinet as a rhythm section and you might get a sense of what The Books are up to for the next season or two. Of course they will also bring their instruments: cello, guitar, bass guitar, samplers, mandolins, a clavinet and whatever else sounds right.

The Black Heart Procession

The Black Heart Procession took root in San Diego in 1997, when Pall Jenkins (vocals, guitars, synths, etc.) and Tobias Nathaniel (piano, guitar, organ, etc.) put their previous band, Three Mile Pilot, on an open-ended hiatus. They are the core members of Black Heart, joined by a revolving group of friends that has included drummers Joe Plummer (Modest Mouse, the Magic Magicians) and Mario Rubalcaba (Rocket From The Crypt), bassist Jimmy LaValle (The Album Leaf) and violinist Matt Resovich (The Album Leaf), among others.

More than just a return to numerical album titles, Six is The Black Heart Procession’s first album to be written and recorded simultaneously with a new Three Mile Pilot album. As both bands now coexist for the first time ever, coconspirators Jenkins and Nathaniel have steered The Black Heart Procession into a darker, more adventurous direction. Produced and recorded by the band over the past couple years, Six is without a doubt the group’s most emotionally resonant album since Three. Brimming with pitch-black ballads of discarded loves and forgotten souls, the album paints a bleak yet strangely comforting portrait of heartbreak, self-destruction and religious allegory over some of their most inspired songs to date, drawing a clear line from here to soul-stirring visionaries such as Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash and Tom Waits.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Past Shows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.