Postal Service - Give Up
(Subpop)
This collaboration between Ben Gibbard (leader of Death Cab for Cutie) and Jimmy Tamborello (Dntel) works much better than one would expect. The collaboration was done by mail (hence the name The Postal Service), but everything matches so well, that fact is somewhat hard to believe. Dntel's glitch has been sent back about twenty years to its foundations in new wave. Nothing is cut-and-pasted, nothing is digitally enhanced; maybe no computers were used at all (recordings were, after all, sent through the mail not through the e-mail). Instead there's just mountains of keyboards, the bare beat of drum-machines, and Gibbard's vocals.
Gibbard's lyrics are richly worded and finely crafted. He doesn't try to make highly personal but cryptic lyrics, like he does so well in Death Cab for Cutie. Instead of opening his heart, he shakes out half-thoughts and sarcastic jokes left in the corners of his mind and reforms them into solidly built pop songs. By doing so, he doesn't just write one-dimensional disco anthems, but something much more colorful and appropriate. In "Sleeping In," he sings "people thought they were just being rewarded" by the onset of global warming because "now we can swim any day in November." In "The District Sleep Alone Tonight," he relates leaving a lover with leaving the community of Washington, D.C, treating empty streets like an empty other-half-of-the-bed.
Gibbard is not alone in singing these songs, as he enlists fellow Seattlites Jen Wood and Jenny Lewis (Rilo Kiley) to accompany him. Gibbard's duet with Wood works exceptionally well in "Nothing Better," as Gibbard and Wood sing alternating verses, which ends up something like examination and cross-examination in a court case. Gibbard starts the song in a hyper-romantic tone, apologizing and essentially proposing, singing "there could be nothing better than making you my bride and slowly growing old together." But as sweeping string-synths raise up, Wood sings "I feel I must interject here... let me help you remember, I've got charts and graphs that should finally make it clear, prepared a lecture on why I have to leave." Perhaps a little corny, but so so enjoyable; the 70th love song.
Tamborello has created very colorful songs for Gibbard to sing on top of. Those looking for glitch and experimentation might be disappointed, but Tamborello still utilizes many tricks from the deeper recesses of his sleeves, whether it's a unique sound or a unique sample or just a well put together song. In "Brand New Colony," the main melodies are built entirely from 80s video game samples. In "This Place is a Prison," the bass is so deep and over-processed it sounds like footsteps in the murk. All songs are well built, but "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" is near perfect, the chorus densely packed with keyboards and powered by a fast-paced clatter of drum machine, and the other section has soft and gentle beds of sounds, injected with pulses of melody.
With Tamborello's new-wave, Merritt-like sound and Gibbard's boyish, McCaughan-like voice, Give Up sounds not unlike an album full of "Dream Hat" covers, the one-song collaboration between Merritt of the Magnetic Fields and McCaughan of Superchunk on the Sixths' album Wasps Nests. That's a good thing, of course. Give Up is retro, but the songs are all so well done you'll quickly forgive them for doing something that's already been done. When it was done before, it usually wasn't done this well.
|
