Five years since their sophomore album Lost and Safe, Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong are back with their masterwork, The Way Out. Having more-or-less created their signature style, electroacoustic "collage" music, which has evolved into something of a scene, Books have since been refining and distilling it into the lean precision of their newest songs, which take otherworldy samples of sounds and voices and process them into gleaming krautocky confections, powered by flowing, stop-start rhythms, synth washes, and acoustic fingerpicking. "Beautiful People" celebrates the mathematical joy of living, while the hilarious "A Cold Freezin' Night" takes a Talkboy-recorded game of children's insult one-upmanship and sets it to a sci-fi folk jangle. By the end of this incredible journey you'll agree with its closing line, "and you're becoming the world and everyone in it."