These are all excerpts from album reviews appearing April 1 through May 15, 2012:
THANK YOU, Everyone who has taken the time to write about the new band... much appreciation. "Dexterous musicianship and catchy pop writing are upgraded to hyper-reality... Zammuto blasts us with musical particles in narrow, swarming beams; each grain rendered with hallucinatory clarity...His joy upon discovering that he still had music to make is evident, and highly contagious". Brian Howe -Pitchfork "F U C-3PO: Best New Track" -Pitchfork "A lithe, spirited, and agreeable release, bursting with pop hooks. For all of Zammuto's vocal and percussive tomfoolery, it has an emotional core. These tracks are ardent and expressive when many current electronic musicians obfuscate or drench their messages in pretension. Zammuto has the chops, but he never flaunts them in an off-putting manner. The Books were all about constructing statements from the detritus of pop culture. Zammuto excels at the opposite: deconstructing life into easily digestible songs that make you feel something. The spotlight has moved from the head to the heart with piebald flourish." -Prefix "Watching Nick Zammuto at his eco-ranch home in Vermont, one cannot help but be taken by the heartfelt beauty of it all: Here’s the young dad grilling pizzas, playing with his children; there’s his pregnant wife cutting a pie filled with homegrown blueberries. In family and in music, the man once behind The Books is an auteur of authenticity, alternately (and at times simultaneously) wedding opposites: playful and ponderous, analog and digital, organic and synthetic, permanent and ephemeral, fuzzy and foreboding... Like the life it sprang from, the album is a statement of self-sufficiency born of creative tensions, between man and woman, people and land, performance and recording. Within these dualities, Zammuto has created something whole." -Paste "Video Review - Nick Zammuto takes his penchant for playful experimentation to a full band setting. Anthony Fontano - The Needle Drop "This impressive album is another landmark addition to the post 2000 avant-pop oeuvre, in every way the equal of Sufjan Stevens’ Age of Adz, Fol Chen or Cornelius. The players really make their instruments sing and the editing process makes the listener double take as to what could be real and what isn’t. Performances are shredded, re-composed, hollowed out and turned upside down. Pieces are structured, non-repetitive and engrossing to listen to. And joy of joys, there are even songs with lyrics which are smart. It’s overcoming the challenge of keeping things that are incredibly complex sounding really simple and direct that impresses us. Zammuto have bottled the sweet joy of becoming, and with what perfect timing – spring is here, and the whole world suddenly feels laden with opportunity." Julian Tardo - Bowlegs Music "When Nick Zammuto and his wife Molly were preparing for the birth of their first child, they ditched their overpriced Brooklyn apartment for a 16 acre plot of high meadow land in rural Vermont. Out behind the house sits a little shack that serves as Zammuto’s music studio. And while this idyllic, down home setting may conjure up images of banjo pluckin’ hootenannies and campfire sing-a-longs, the sounds that emanate from this back woods shack are of another order entirely...the most captivating songs speak to the incredible potential of the project, and are among the more engaging that I’ve heard in quite some time." Robert Alford -Pop Matters "We get a lot of records sent to us here at The A.V. Club. Fortunately, we end up liking some of them...This is an expansive debut, unattached from the stylistic spine of The Books, Nick Zammuto’s apparently gone a little crazy. It works." Grayson Currin -The Onion AV Club "The album begins with the ecstatically titled “YAY,” his soaring vocals chopped up into thin slices of squeaky bursts accompanied by clanging drums. It’s a giddy opener that signals this won’t be a post-breakup mope fest. Instead, Zammuto seems intent on showing that for as brilliant as the Books could be, he was only scratching the surface of his own musical interests within the group. No song overstays its welcome on the album, and a few almost make you yearn for a more sprawling, indulgent director’s cut... This record feels like a race to an unknowable destination." Dan Jackson -CMJ "The full-band approach to Zammuto gives it a more immediately infectious, even danceable sound than that of much of his prior work... Zammuto spends equal time in both complex, nuanced human mode and in haywire, hyperactive robot mode. Yet the distance between the two isn't as great as it might sound on paper. These four musicians' greatest strength, and one that Nick Zammuto himself has spent a solid decade perfecting, is making the synthetic seem organic, and vice-versa. It may be a step closer to living among Replicants, but Zammuto should be applauded for tapping into a formula to overcome the uncanny valley." -Treble Breakfast at Sulimays: "Flexing new muscles and honing new skills without abandoning the basic love for words that served as the joyful inspiration behind everything the Books put together. And it is, itself, a joyful record, prickly and playful and sometimes downright bizarre, but never less than welcoming. Perhaps most successfully, it stands entirely on its own." Brent Able -Coke Machine Glow "You can never quite get a hand on it and the moment you do there’s something totally out of place and fascinating being thrown at you...super-funky... a great example of Zammuto’s ability to call to mind multiple genres and still sound totally alien to all of them." - American Grotesque "A damn fine album... The overall strength of Zammuto lies in its song-writing." David John Wood -No Ripcord "Simply put, Nick Zammuto has released one the best albums of 2012." -Etcetcetcetc "Well, the transition worked better than anyone could have possibly imagined... What is surprising is that the quality of his new self-titled release makes it so fans likely will no longer feel like there has been something truly lost with the break-up of his once main musical project... It is an inspiring album, that expands its listeners conception of what pop music can and should be." Mark Schiffer -In Your Speakers "Whether it be the schizophrenic balladry of Too Late To Topologize or the contorted futuro- folk stylings of Harlequin the Books suddenly appears to be a prologue to the history currently being emphatically scribed by this greatly eccentric introvert and with a tangible, earthly joy returning to fertilise his work, that enviable childish naïveté may bloom... entirely ceremonious shredding of rulebook; The Shape Of Things To Come slithers of inordinate promise and uncompromising artistry." -Dots and Dashes "Potential singles are hardly a concern for Nick Zammuto... (the new band) retains the spirit of humor, adventure, and experimentation his critically renowned former band The Books has perfected over the past decade. This album is total sonic schizophrenia with a charmingly high "huh?" factor: confusing, amusing, and consistently entertaining." Marty Flanagan -BlackBook "Zammuto represents a form of reaction to the dissolution of The Books from its creator, and although such reactions are generally dour affairs relating to loss this is an album that often fizzes with energy. This is an album that revels in the possibilities of a new and uncertain future. The technical proficiency displayed is too obvious to ignore (but) away from Zammuto’s obvious skill as a song crafter, the heart of this album is the drumming of Sean Dixon which at times defies belief. He’s more than capable of providing a solid backbeat when required to drive these songs along, but when he really cuts loose as on the skittering jazz freakout of Weird Ceiling it can be mind boggling." Sam Shepherd -OMH "an important part of The Books' success was that they knew how to use a novelty without letting it turn into a gimmick. And luckily, Zammuto keeps that tradition alive... it takes the work of a truly visionary musician to re-contextualizes it into a different genre, all while retaining the qualities that made him such a celebrated sonic auteur in the first place." Ryan Stanley -405 "An intelligent album of headphones music filled with warmth and soul. Zammuto sounds both relieved and exhilarated by his newfound direction. Zammuto (the band) is a traditional four-piece rock band set up with a guitarist, bassist, drummer and “multi instrumentalist.” Sure, it doesn’t sound all that interesting, but their originality isn’t predicated upon their component ingredients, but instead upon the compositions Zammuto has crafted. As a result, the recipe pairs well with Kasey’s Avocado Toast with Poached Egg. All of the ingredients in the recipe are pretty standard. Toast. Avocado. Poached Egg. But as an open- faced sandwich, it’s unique and delicious primarily because of the way the ingredients are put together. Like the album, it succeeds because it relies on excellent ingredients thoughtfully combined. -Turntable Kitchen "Imagine a mixture of elements you love from Black Moth Super Rainbow/Tobacco, Beck, Laurie Anderson, The Yes Album-era Yes, and that guy at the farmer’s market who stands there playing music for loose change while everyone heads the other direction looking for zucchini and corn...Zammuto is that uncool kid that you want to be down with because he knows better." John Book -This Is Book's Music "There are no trick pony’s here; Zammuto’s creativity has the ability to outlast anything the Books ever put out... this may be the most creative and experimental album to emerge this year." -Team Hellions "Listen to this album. It’s been on replay for me for the past four hours. Seriously. I know that you aren’t really suppose to over-think this album, and rightfully so. Enjoy it for what it sounds like and try not to be a d-bag like me and dissect it. It’s good and I would recommend it to you." Nickwan -402 Productions "The first time I heard The Books... my idea of music was dismantled and rebuilt...Now, when I listen to Zammuto, I hear a Books album explored and expanded, refined and premeditated over a decade. The Books was an incubator and Zammuto was the egg... Zammuto made an experimental album that doesn’t expire. Prepare to give in to the percussive urgency, melodic journeys and peculiar vocals. Leave your current collection in the truck of your car in downtown Reno, place Zammuto on your shelf and see what happens next." Erik Stabile -Potholes in My Blog "Rather than being a ‘music minus one’ presentation, a recording in which part of a distinctive collaboration is sorely missed, Zammuto has a distinctive sound all its own. ...one looks forward to many more interesting sounds from Nick Zammuto." Christian Carey -File Under "Rooted in his new home in the Green Mountains of Southern Vermont, Nick Zammuto and his band record and mix all of their music on their land. Nick Zammuto and his talented group of family are in a state of self sufficiency musically from the rest, pushing a lush landscape of cinematic pop into extremes of beauty never felt before...The drumming is incredible on this debut, with Sean Dixon paving a new road for Nick and the rest of the group to play on... Zammuto is a record we can’t get enough and one that we feel is pushing the evolution of positive forward thinking exploratory music to even newer unseen heights." Erik Otis -Sound Colour Vibration "Zammuto is indeed the offspring of Books co-founder/songwriter Nick Zammuto, on a more solid tact towards organic songwriting with huge dollops of that instinctive cut-up structuralism that's achieved in a given Books song by the splicing of a galaxy's worth of found samples." John Bail -Impose |
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"Songs that merge the nimble, the knotty, the philosophical and the pensive, living up to song titles like 'Too Late to Topologize' and 'Idiom Wind...sometimes paired with videos. The clips were tours de force of editing, with every quick cut matched by the band’s music... |
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'The Homesteader' Bill Orton - Wunderkammer |
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