And the duo's brand of point-click indie-pop has begun to inspire their peers to follow suit: Rather than find his own tech support for his recent digital wanderings, Conor Oberst merely picked up his phone and growled quaveringly to his secretary, "Get me Tamborello! All of which is good reason for Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello to celebrate with a few cold-brewed Coors Lights-- but not a reasonable justification to shake the last few shards of pocket change out of two-year-old Give Up.
Christmas carol backing vocals, accordion samples, and the climactic New Order keyboards can't distract from lyrics about fallout shelters and uncontrollable mitosis-induced body explosions.
It's difficult to think of a movie looking for that lap-pop Hiroshimal sound The single's lone new track is "Be Still My Heart", which-- as its title might imply-- is typical Postal Service heart-meet-sleeve territory.
Sadly, it seems only half -hearted: Built around dreary old guitars and live drums, it sounds more or less like a Death Cab demo with a few anxious clicking noises added to it. Clicking noises are also the weapon of choice on the single's two remixes, Morr Music producer Styrofoam's take on "Nothing Better", and Matthew Dear's reworking of the A-side. The Human League-biting medical terminology duet of "Nothing Better" is much more deserving of promotion to single status than "Silhouettes", but sometime-Notwist and Gibbard collaborator Styrofoam doesn't add much to the original, oddly choosing to make it more rockier while adding a rhythm track that sort of sounds like a guy making the O-face and flicking his cheeks.
Ghostly International tech-house wunderkind Matthew Dear takes a few more liberties with "Silhouettes", giving it the old separate-the-elements treatment and spiking the track's drink with a handful of Ambien. The swirling ambient loops alter the music to fit the lyrical creepiness a little better, but it still doesn't quite nail the mood, perhaps due to Gibbard's incorruptibly saccharine delivery.
Someone should've been a bit more willing to goth it up, or maybe just have given the song over to another band, a la the Postal Service's "Such Great Heights" single. Anybody death metal would do though I guess it'd be hard to find one with a Sub Pop contract. One wonders if the protracted flogging of that album means that new product from the band is far off-- especially since Gibbard is busy riding Death Cab's prestige into the indie MOR growth market, and Tamborello is embracing his newfound role as the go-to guy for indie heartthrobs looking to modernize their sound.
If so, that's a shame, as their snail-mail collaboration remains the most effective shuffling of the IDM and indie scenes in decades. Though it may be extreme and out of touch with reality, how else does one survive in such a tumultuous place? Even in the midst of destruction, life goes on.
Dystopia is what you make of it, a hopeful message for us today in a world full of global warming and nuclear bombs. Maybe it will somehow all work out. As bad as things are, global nuclear destruction is still far less likely than it was back then.
I sometime wonder what that who situation did to my generation—gave us a wicked sense of irony for one thing, or perhaps a highly developed sense of the absurd.
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