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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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The Postal Service: Gadget Pop's Glorious Return
Wednesday 23 April @ 12:51:49 |
 by Rob van Alstyne
Somewhere during the Nintendo era, long before anyone had heard that dirty little word “electronica”(damn you Prodigy!), there were pop-rock bands with a taste for synthesized textures and spiffy drum loops that people could be proud to love. (New Order and Depeche Mode are some prime examples.) As electronic music’s beats-per-minute factor continued to rise, however, it seems that tech-inflected pop-rock bands went the way of neon-colored clothes and big hair. In the present, electronic music and indie-pop occupy two distinct camps. Thankfully, the Postal Service has come along with their debut album, Give Up (SubPop), just in time to break down the divide between dance hall ravers and mopey indie-rock kids.
The unlikely pairing of Death Cab for Cutie front man Ben Gibbard’s sweet voice with experimental electronic artist Jimmy Tamborello’s sublime beats constitute the Postal Service’s key ingredients. Coming together for what was supposed to be a one-off collaboration on Tamborello’s electronic Dntel project, the pair so enjoyed the resulting single, “The Dream of Evan and Chan,” that they decided to try and make an album’s worth of material together. Tamborello sent instrumental numbers to Gibbard on tape (courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service, of course), and Gibbard overdubbed his vocals and the occasional guitar part.
“It was a really easy and casual record to make,” explains Gibbard via telephone during the band’s inaugural tour. “We only had a couple of points where we had to meditate on it. We had no expectations going into the record and no idea how it would work out. When you start something in that manner and then it actually starts to work out it’s a pretty amazing time. Also, I didn’t really know Jimmy at all before we started making this record together. I was getting to know him as a person and a musician simultaneously and it was working out on both levels.” The chemistry between Gibbard and Tamborello speaks for itself on the entirety of Give Up, a collection of immediately entrancing dance-pop sure to make even the most jaded hipster shake their ass a bit.
“There were only two words that were thrown around about the focus of the record when we started making it, and those were dancey and poppy,” says Gibbard. “I think what’s so great about Jimmy is that he makes electronic music that doesn’t feel sterile—it’s sort of brimming with emotion. We wanted to make a record that was more electronically-based without having everything be sort of emotionless and German.”
Gibbard’s presence helps to up the emotional quotient as well, his boyish croon and heart-on-sleeve lyricism recalling past relationships with a sharp eye. Give Up presents a return to the more directly relationship-oriented songs Gibbard avoided on his primary band Death Cab for Cutie’s last release, Photo Album.
“I think that I’ve kind of ceased having any intentional direction in terms of my lyric writing now,” claims Gibbard. “I’m realizing more that the music tends to push songs in certain lyrical directions and to just let that happen. I don’t mind writing relationship songs: I feel like I would rather write something that’s true and connected to my experience than to try and write something else just to make an effort to do something new.”
Things have gone so well for the Postal Service thus far (their current tour has sold out nearly every date) that talk of album No. 2 is already in the works. For now, however, Gibbard and Tamborello are concentrating on transforming the synthetic sounds of the Postal Service into an engaging live show. “This has been a really fun trip. The shows have been good and it’s fun playing the smaller venues that Death Cab used to play as they were coming up. For the live show Jimmy has his laptop and mixing board and I’m playing keyboards and guitar. Jenny Lewis from Rilo Kiley is playing some and singing. Nick [Harmer, bassist for Death Cab] is running a projector with these flash videos we made. It’s definitely more of a concerted show effort, especially than what Death Cab normally does. I think we’re trying to make it as exciting as possible. We all realized that having Jimmy come up there with a mixing board and press play while I sang would be ridiculous.”
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