I'm a young man with a short attention span, full of energy and bile. I don't have time for your ‘adult' music, grandpa- I want attention-deficit song structures, bleeping atonal synths, shouty boy-girl vocals, noisy guitars, and handclaps. I don't want pleasantness. I don't want *folk*. Life's too short to not be shouting, and fast.Or, well, that's what in my more militantly ideologically-solid music taste days I *like* to think. But you know sometimes, when you're sitting alone in your room with the world at the distance of an internet connection, wasting your youth away, its nice to just snuggle up with something all cosy, and fuzzy, and warm. Like The Microphones, or Circulatory System. Or, er, you know, in the traditional leading-into style, this- Trouble Books, a sort of ambient lo-fi indie-pop duo from Akron, Ohio, whose album The United Colours of Trouble Books is coming out over here on new label MIE as an apparently very lush-sounding limited release soon.You know how Beach House sound? Yeah well Trouble Books kind of sound like how I *imagined* Beach House to sound, before I actually, you know heard them and it sort of ruined it (not that the first album at least didn't have its moments). Or the little snatches of Yo La Tengo where Ira and Georgia sing together and its just all utterly lovely. Or some obscure Elephant 6 band, slowed down.You could sort of curl and up just live in this music, cosy and forever. Its all tape hiss and perfect sound forever guitars and gentle horns and steady, softly drumming and a sometimes a bit of violin and mumbling. There's such an incredible intimacy that it sort of sounds like you're just listening to the boy and the girl members make it through the cracks in their bedroom door. Its so soft and quiet that despite the fact these are all, like, proper songs and everything, it *becomes* ambient. And not in a bad way. In a really, really good way. Glittery and golden, sparkling distant lights like ‘The Glow, Pt 2'... I guess like how Times New Viking turn their simple pop songs into scuzzy noise just by how its all recorded, Trouble Books do the same, only they turn *their* simple pop songs into a very lulling fog. Again, in a good way. Little touches and stuff... just check how comparatively pure ‘CFHC' is left and how amazing *that* is... I mean, they've pretty much mastered their chosen aesthetic here (all the tracks were recorded on a "semi-broken" 8-track). Even in like ‘On And On Submerged Ark' where there is one bit where it all spirals really quite dissonantly but then... its not dissonant. Its like some calamity just taking place *in the distance*. Yeh. Same thing happens with ‘For All Our Dead Friends' immediately afterwards and with all the noise after the song bit on that.Ends perfectly too. Or, well, I guess slightly imperfectly, but on a perfect slightly imperfect note, with ‘Personal Tornados', the most open and nakedly lovely song on the record... ending too soon and caving into silence, resplendent for all the minute it actually exists. "I can't explain why, but I wake up happy." Stop. 81%Trouble Books on MySpace