headlessparrot's Full Review: Give Up by The Postal Service
We live in an ever evolving world, where everyday some new technological advancement arrives on store shelves that make or lives easier and allow us to survive and thrive with less human contact than ever before. Multinational corporations and small mom-and-pop operations can carry out their business with remarkable speed, buying and selling in seconds where it used to take weeks. Has society really benefited from these innovations, or are we just building to a massive crescendo followed by our own decline? I’m not sure if anyone has the definitive answer to this question, but in a climate of instantaneousness, it’s at least somehow comforting to know that at least something gets done the old fashioned way - through the mail. That’s just what the indie rock-meets-techno duo the Postal Service has shown us on their debut collaboration, Give Up.
Many of the elitist class of music fans will instantly recognize the core membership of the Postal Service. Ben Gibbard has been perhaps one of the most productive artists in independent music over the past two or so years, not only in his role with Death Cab For Cutie and in a solo capacity, but also as the main lyricist and vocalist for the Postal Service. The lesser-known Jimmy Tamborello (currently performing as electronica artist Dntel but with past membership in indie rock outfits), however, may well be the driving force between the duo. Originally conceived only a one-off collaboration for a Dntel EP, the relationship between the two musicians blossomed into an unusual, musical approximation of the Odd Couple - two artists with styles that heavily contrast one another and combining to create something that actually succeeds. Someone, somewhere, must have deemed the initial collaboration a sensation, so This is the Dream of Evan and Chan was followed by the establishment of a partnership proper. Perhaps the most interesting facet of Gibbard and Tamborello’s recording relationship is the way in which their creations are brought to fruition. Rather than recording together, the vast majority of Give Up was pieced together over long distances - sending song snippets, lyrics and overdubs back and forth between each other through that most hallowed of institutions, the United States Postal Service (hence, of course, the duo’s name - which was later to be the source of a since-settled legal dispute). I must admit that I was initially sceptical that this arrangement actually existed, if only because Give Up is an album so meticulously crafted and carefully constructed that there just seems no way that it could have been the result of what amounts to a pre-pubescent style pen-pal relationship.
The crux of Give Up, and of the Postal Service in general, lies in the contrast between the cold, sterile and emotionless vibe of Tamborello’s electronic beats and the high emotion, vulnerability and passion of Death Cab For Cutie’s bittersweet indie pop. In and of itself, there’s nothing particularly remarkable about that; it’s essential a newly updated version of New Order, albeit in a somewhat more indie-minded context. What really sets Give Up apart from its predecessors and influences is not its originality, but the actual songcraft of the album’s ten cuts. Gibbard has always been able to set himself apart from other likeminded acts through his lyrics. His vocals are very much typical of emo (a word that I hate, but yet seems somehow appropriate) - high, strained and cracking, filled with longing and angst - and his lyrics are in the same vein, but there’s just something about the phrasing and the clever choice of each word that somehow makes him seem much more relevant in comparison to, say, Dashboard Confessional. On Give Up, he’s at his best; this is perfect mood music for feeling angry and lonely to.
Tamborello, the other half of the equation, captures that same mood perfectly in his own way, through his choice of accompaniment. For the most part, it is tasteful, subtle and sparse. In fact, his sparse underpinnings are what really drive the record and breathe life into it. With only Tamborello’s carefully programmed, intricate beats, his stuttering synth loops and his cut-and-paste strings, Gibbard’s wavering, impassioned and endearingly rough-edged voice is given centre stage (with help in part by back-up vocalists Jen Wood and Jenny Lewis - the latter better known for her work as a child actress and, more relevantly, front woman for indie pop powerhouse Rilo Kiley). That passion bleeds right through the speakers and into the listener’s mind. I felt myself instantly sympathetic to the feelings of inadequacy and isolation expressed in the compositions. The final touches on Give Up come from careful guitar and piano overdubs that appear on a few cuts. Rarely blatant, these added textures only serve to further develop and explore the dichotomy of Tamborello’s sterile beats and Gibbard’s human, imperfect vocals, further capturing the raw and affecting quality of the songs.
The duo’s musical ideology is no better captured than on Give Up’s opening two tracks (which also happen to be record’s first two singles). The District Sleeps Alone Tonight opens with a drawn out organ tone that gradually recedes into Tamborello’s programmed clicks and swirls and the whisper quiet vocals, accented by Jenny Lewis’ imperfect but strangely intoxicating backing vocals. The beats quicken and a repeated keyboard part enters, capturing the sterile emptiness of Gibbard’s lyrical vision (“You seem so out of context in this gaudy apartment complex”). Such Great Heights is a much-faster paced track, its beats melding into a pulsating, fascinating melody that relies heavily on the strained vocals at the forefront.
Nothing Better is Give Up’s most interesting track, a static-y yet bubbly and sickly saccharine sweet electro-pop duet with Gibbard and Jen Wood playing the part of ex-lovers, trading vocals; Ben’s over dramatized longing contrasted by Jen’s causticity and indifference. Clark Gable begins with a gently whirling, gradually building ambient synth part that breaks into mid-tempo drum and bass loop over which Gibbard performs what is lyrically the album’s strongest cut, reflecting on the shallow understanding of love as propagated by what we see in movies and television - “I was waiting for a cross-town in the London underground when it struck me that I've been waiting since birth to find a love that would look and sound like a movie.”
For the most part, the rest of the songs follow in a vein similar to Such Great Heights, bouncy and strangely melodic beats propelling Ben’s shrill vocal protestations of love and loss, essentially illustrating how important Tamborello’s involved loops are in making something sensible out of Gibbard’s all-consuming Greek tragedy of existence. The only real exceptions to the formula developed by mid-album are Brand New Colony, with accompaniment that seems just as home in a game of Space Invaders, the constantly shifting narrative of Natural Anthem, and the album’s only stumbling block in Sleeping In. Musically, its one of the strongest cuts here, but Gibbard isn’t fully able to translate that into something more concrete; lyrically it’s a winding and confused narrative with awkward phrasing that stumbles through referencing of the Kennedy assassination and global warming (it’s never really made clear, however, what exactly ties the two together, beyond the narrator‘s schizophrenic dream sequence).
But aside from Sleeping In and Ben Gibbard’s occasional problem with overanalysing and/or over emotionalizing his content, Give Up is a remarkably consistent album that touches on many of the clichés of modern music but never really falls back to rely entirely on them. It is loneliness, sadness and isolation - but maybe more than that, it’s unabashedly pure pop (albeit covered in a tough candy shell exterior), which makes it a little disconcerting to know that it has only recently achieved anything even remotely in the way of commercial success - and even that success feels more like a by-product of Death Cab for Cutie’s sudden success in certain circles then the result of its own musical merits. This, of course, is a tremendous shame, because if anything in the pop music pantheon deserves to be appreciated on its own merits, this is surely it. Give Up is not perfect, but very little is, and the Postal Service deserve tremendous credit for the album that they were able to piece together through the United States Postal Service.
The collaboration between Death Cab For Cutie s Ben Gibbard and Dntel s Jimmy Tamborello is an album of breezy electronic pop that updates classic 80s...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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