It took me way too long to decide whether the photo’s actually one dude with color contacts…
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[5.45]
Jonathan Bradley: After completing a few listens of “A Tattered Line of String,” I returned with rising alarm to the Postal Service’s now decade-old Give Up. Had the album failed to survive these post–Owl City times? Had I been over-impressed as an undergraduate by Jimmy Tamborello’s synth burbles and Ben Gibbard’s plaintive vignettes? “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” was enough to reassure me; this duo’s one-off collaboration deserved the warmth with which I recollected it. This new tune gets the sound right — it is perhaps too studied a replication, considering how much most artists evolve in the space of ten years — but Give Up was as much about its dreamy, faintly dislocated aesthetic as it was the then-novel idea of putting an indie pop artist’s vocal over synth pop melodies. True, Gibbard’s lyrics on the original record had a sentimentalism that was, at that point, yet to make its way into Death Cab’s, but his narratives were still more inventive than the drab description here of a New York hookup too gnomic to even be a scene from a generation-defining HBO series. If “A Tattered Line of String” were a heretofore lost B-side it would be more intriguing — those guitar stabs liven up proceedings nicely, even if Tamborello’s arrangement has none of the richness of the canned strings and 8-bit bleeps that characterised the original — but as a reunion, it has none of the felicity of the first collaboration.
[6]
Crystal Leww: I really like that first Postal Service album, but gosh, this just sounds so cartoonish and twee in the way that people would rather not be associated with. The way that Gibbard inflects upwards at the end of lines is grating rather than charming, and the computer-generated drumbeats sound really fake. I do like the the female vocal in the bridge, though.
[5]
Alfred Soto: A singer this boring has historical precedents adducing a triumph over not-bad-at-all minimalist programming, but Bernard Sumner doesn’t sound this fussy and is too distracted a writer to worry about metaphors and such. So here’s hoping he kidnaps Ben Gibbard’s femme backup singer.
[6]
Scott Mildenhall: Obvious one-liner o’clock: pretty, but also pretty apparent that someone’s been listening to Owl City.
[7]
Brad Shoup: Cripes. For, like, months after Give Up came out, I’d check the Billboard Electronic Albums chart, just to marvel at our robot overlords’ classification algorithms. Ten years on, I’m still a little mystified. It was Death Cab — an honest to God band, eventually — who granted Gibbard any hope of palatability. This kind of puttering DFA knockoff couldn’t put anyone over, let alone a dude who describes sex as “things that we knew not to do”.
[2]
Anthony Easton: I like the banal detail of the opening lines (though I am not exactly sure why they should not have done the things they have done), but they soon move into awkward metaphors and cliches of blankness. It’s a bit of a disappointment.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Given the number of times I’ve had this experience (hell is the late-night 34th St. transfer; no one ever seems as hellish at the time) and the number of Postal Service followers in my library (no, not him), I should love this. But it doesn’t work. The lyrics are glib where they shouldn’t be, as is the backing. How I defend the Postal Service is the way laptop electro — and little else — sounds mostly cold, past diffident and heading toward dead, but done right has this clinical warmth, like fluorescent light on tile. This just sounds perky. Perky isn’t so defensible.
[5]
Patrick St. Michel: Admitting that Give Up was one of my first exposures to electronic music — and a really important album to 16-year-old me, which should sum up my adolescence — is not exactly something to boast about in 2013. I would have loved “A Tattered Line Of String” back then, as it’s bouncy electro-pop coupled with wannabe-romantic lyrics. Today, I wouldn’t go as batty for this — Ben Gibbard really does suck at writing lyrics, something I am far more willing to admit now — but I’m also not going to call this a guilty pleasure. Allow me this moment to be a goofy teen again.
[7]
Iain Mew: Knocking this down a point for reasons which will be clear in a few days, but the smooth and bustling production, the way that it elevates Ben Gibbard’s guileless poetry just so, Jenny Lewis half-succeeding in stealing the show from the background… I had no idea until I heard this that I missed them so much.
[8]
Jer Fairall: Somewhere, 24-year-old me is probably swooning. Right here, 34-year-old me is definitely yawning.
[5]
Ian Mathers: The production is busier but not more interesting than the first album, and Gibbard continues to show that he can only occasionally write good/interesting/moving songs (a couple on the first Postal Service record, a couple more scattered throughout the Death Cab for Cutie discography). I get why the gauche-but-effective likes of “Such Great Heights” and “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” struck a chord, but this time they are the ones worth leaving.
[3]