Recap The Books at Majestic Theatre

The Books lugged their audiovisual smorgasbord from New England to the Majestic Theatre on Monday night, and a surprisingly large audience greeted the witty duo's oceanic range of emotion. "This is our first time in Madison," muttered guitarist-vocalist Nick Zammuto, before informing the audience that the duo had been getting "really into hypnotherapy." The pair then launched the set with a new tune titled "Group Therapy," which centered on audio samples from cheesy old hypnotherapy videos. The swelling cello and twitching found-sound rhythms weren't a huge departure from 2005's Lost And Safe, but the tune (just like every other in the set) featured a meticulously crafted video accompaniment that couldn't have suited the music more perfectly. Beaming from a screen behind Zammuto and cellist Paul De Jong was a balding, goateed head floating in space, informing the audience that the "body is a glass container." A series of ghastly floating heads led the crowd through a session of cackling anti-hypnosis, and somewhere along the way, a glass of juice was poured out of a giant ear.

While The Books' set stretched across Lost And Safe, 2003's The Lemon Of Pink, and 2002's Thought For Food, it also yanked several new tunes from the duo's bucket-hat of glitchy sound collages. One song, "Cold Freezin' Night," focused on samples lifted from used Talkboy cassettes. (Yes, the Talkboy: The handheld recorder that Macaulay Culkin made famous by annoying the piss out of his "parents" with it in Home Alone 2.) Notable excerpts included a little girl babbling off reasons for wanting to be a boy, another little girl complaining about an "asshole," and a young boy expressing his desire to "blow your brains out." While the new tunes stayed rooted in The Books' balance between organic strings and found-sound, their respective videos proved just as crucial. It really seems as though The Books are making an effort to make the full transition to an audio-visual band and succeeding. Meanwhile, "We Bought The Flood" scratched at far darker surfaces as footage from the Civil Rights Movement, The Great Depression, and houses floating in floods flickered behind the pair's haunting string arrangements.

The A.V. Club had one looming question: How in the hell did De Jong and Zammuto sync up with the DVD and backing audio so perfectly without the additional help of a click track (an earphone beat that many sample-fueled bands use to keep themselves in sync live)? For example, over De Jong's stuttering and soaring cello on set-closer "Smells Like Content," Zammuto's hushed vocals locked in tightly with a series of flashing word fragments on the screen as he finger-picked lush chords on his acoustic guitar. Even when Zammuto triggered an effects pedal during a cover of Nick Drake's "Cello Song" (the band's first encore and contribution to the Dark Was The Night compilation released earlier this year), it was like clockwork. After De Jong and Zammuto cleaned up with "An Owl With Knees," they politely enjoyed a massive standing ovation. While there will always be a tug-of-war between massive referentialism and progression in pop music, The Books' live prowess is one thing that helps forward-thinking audio live up to its promise.