The Books’ Nick Zammuto and Paul de jong are a different breed of musician. Their albums are primarily composed of cut-and-pasted sound bites they’ve found from vintage thrift store cassettes, they recorded music specifically to be played in an elevator in France, and their first single of 2010 was a hymnal dedicated to Zammuto’s favorite irrational number. If these accounts happen to make you laugh, don’t feel bad. Zammuto and de jong are in on the joke. For their fourth and latest album, The Way Out, they have ingenuously created an introspective psychedelic trip of grace and humor that will put a smile on your face if it doesn’t leave you questioning the aspects of your life on this planet first.

For The Way Out, The Books have exclusively used samples from hypnotherapy and self-help tapes to orchestrate the latest installment of their original genre, elctro-folk, or as they call it “sound collage.” The result is a magnificent journey into your own mind through the consultation and discussion of others. The opening and closing tracks, “Group Autogenics I and II,” act as bookends that both welcome and bid you adieu whilst forcing you to look inside yourself via the advice of personal improvement lectures. Although they seem silly from afar, the soothing background of acoustic plucks and broken melodies gently swallow you until you are completely immersed within the calming sounds. The stunning, “Thirty Incoming,” uses recorded telephone conversations to transform the listener into a silent voyeur as you secretly examine and judge the anonymous voices on the line.

The Books don’t just leave us dumbfounded by the thought of self-discovery. They induce laughter on tracks like, “A Cold Freezin’ Night,” which depicts two arguing children playfully threatening despicable methods of execution, and “The Story of Hip Hop” that explains the genre’s history like that of a children’s book.

With a unique style such as this, they are not experimenting as much as they’re returning to their original format of the audio sample. They’ve nearly abandoned the vocal presence of Zammuto that was heard on their last album, Lost and Safe, and only truly use it on, “All You Need is a Wall,” and, “We Bought the Flood.” Though breaking up the theme of vocal sampling, both tracks are just enchanting enough to keep with the flow of the album, allowing the listener a slight break of pace and still left undisrupted. This is a perfect way to describe the entire album itself. With its relaxing tones and thoughtful messages it is capable of providing a much needed escape from the stressful routines of life or, in this case, a way out.