Those who praise The Books’ studio albums have really only experienced half of what the duo of Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong have to offer. That the band originally had no intentions of touring is the great irony of their live performance; a live perormance which is more engaging and compelling than anything else coming through your town this spring.

“We never planned on playing live. It was just something we weren’t ever really all that interested in until recently. And then when we realized it could really work we became more interested in it,” said Zammuto.

The band’s live offering is an organic blend of what you hear in their albums. All the familiar samples are present. The cello, played by de Jong, is there. The acoustic guitar, played by Zammuto, is also there. But this isn’t karaoke, folks.

“We didn’t want to have a laptop on stage, we didn’t want to go in that direction. We wanted to play our own instruments and you know really… yeah just play as much as we can while we’re on stage. Paul is a brilliant cellist… so we built the show around his playing and I kind of strum along with the guitar and sing a bit.”

The Books played University of Washington’s Husky Student Union Building this past Friday to a sold out crowd. The auditorium’s grandiose stage framed the two men in the center beautifully as five hundred seated onlookers waited to see how the band would tackle the feat of reproducing the sample-heavy songs from their three albums.

In practice, The Books recreate their studio recordings with little derivation. That the reproduction is so faithful to that which listeners have grown accustomed is just as impressive than if they had tried to mess with the songs.

And as they play, moving images spanning decades scroll on a thirty foot projection screen behind them.

“We use the videos very similarly to how we work with sound. Kind of a collage… we do a lot of cutting and editing of the videos to sync along with our music in a very one to one relationship. It’s a very synesthetic way of working for us,” said Zammuto in regards to the visual portion of their shows.

The relationship between the songs and accompanying video is not always clear. The opening song of their set That Right Ain’t Shit is paired with video clips of the founders of the Mormon Church staring at a camera as they remove and re-don their hats. The link between the song and the video is not immediately or even latently obvious.

Other times, when the band lets you in on the backstory of a song, the projections make more sense. As in the new song The Classy Penguin which Zammuto reveals was his brother Mikey’s idea. During this song the screen flashes home video footage of Zammuto and his brother, clips of a young de Jong and even synchronized video of Mikey playing acoustic bass along with the band.

Regardless of how the videos relate to the songs they accompany, they certainly elicit strong emotions from concert goes. At the conclusion of each song the entire auditorium erupted in wild applause. Though, that applause may have seemed that much louder in contrast to the dead silence of the crowd during the songs.

Following the show I overhead one young lady remark to her friend that the conert was “I dunno, more of, like, an experience than a concert, you know?”. Though I don’t identify with her lack of articulation, I do agree with her. The Books put on a concert that is an experience you will seldom find elsewhere.