thePULSEThe Postal Service’s Give Up
Good news for SubPop label
September 2003 – Back in the day — say, circa 1990 — SubPop was the alternative/independent record label to be on. The company was defined by bands like Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and Nirvana, who would all of course lead the Seattle grunge music binge. Once these bands moved up on the music food chain, leaving the smaller label for larger conglomerates, SubPop hit a lull in significant output.
Until now. Within the past couple of years, SubPop has been the home of many indie superstars: Sunny Day Real Estate, International Noise Conspiracy, The Rapture, and The Postal Service — the year’s most unlikely contender for best record.
Jimmy Taborello and Benjamin Gibbard make up the The Postal Service duo. Taborello, a former member of an electronica-pop group called Figurine, is also known by the name DNTEL. Gibbard handles vocals and guitars in the indie band Death Cab for Cutie. After a collaboration in 2000, the two decided to make a full-length album: Give Up.
In theory, The Postal Service’s approach to music does not sound like the most appealing combination of elements. Taborello creates electronic landscapes, all programmed deliberately and without the faintest sound of human involvement. Gibbard’s powers lie in his passionate voice, which somehow retains an innocent, choir-boy quality.
This is not an entirely new equation. A techno beat with an angelic voice is perhaps the most overdone trick in the electronica book. But the Postal Service is different — why?
Firstly, and obviously, there is a male vocal lead. Most club songs feature a female singing over the mechanical throbbing of a sequencer. (Give Up is not without a woman’s touch, though, as every song features female back-up vocals.) The second defining difference of The Postal Service is Gibbard’s emo word play.
Death Cab for Cutie, Benjamin Gibbard’s full time band, is the quintessential emo band. His vocals are so full of emotion that you can almost see his face cringing through the ten tracks of the album. His lyrics, on paper, are dramatic and rhythmically obscure.
“I tried my best to leave this all on your/ machine but the persistent beat it sounded/ thin upon listening,” a line from Give Up’s first single, “Such Great Heights,” lacks any sense of meter or rhythm. Yet somehow, Gibbard and Taborello are able to make these words as fluid as a blinking digital clock — it all flows succinctly together.
But Gibbard’s lyrics soften up the mechanical clicking that does become wearing at times. On “Clark Gable,” Gibbard laments, “I was waiting for a cross-town train 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/ so I changed my plans I rented a camera and/ a can and then I called you.” For the most part, this is a collection of love songs, with an air of modernity as a backdrop.
The paradigm created by The Postal Service is not man versus machine, or one of a machine given some type of artificial intelligence. Instead, what Gibbard and Taborello have made is a relationship like that between a person and a pacemaker. One needs the other to live, while the other has no purpose without its human dependent.
The two genres represented here would have never been thought to create this result. Emo music and electronica-pop are not totally alien to each other. Both are supported mostly by independent labels — really the fringe of the radio mainstream. Thus, it is a bringing together of the fringe, and becomes appealing to two people who like both opposing varieties of music — as well as people who are able to recognize the pure songwriting merit of the album.
Give Up may not prove to be a monumental album in this decade or even this year. But The Postal Service’s crossover appeal and the creation of unique and amusing music is worthy enough of some type of praise, helping the SubPop label return to glory.
