Such Great Heights: Ten years of The Postal Service

I was convinced, when the first set of rumours began swirling in early January, that suggestions of a Postal Service reunion were bound to prove wide of the mark.

Ben Gibbard spent the latter part of 2012 promoting his first solo record, Former Lives – effectively a selection of odds and ends from the past few years in his day job as Death Cab for Cutie frontman – and I’d read a fair few interviews in support of it; every time, the obvious question about The Postal Service was posed, and every time, he let the journalist down gently. I even recall, at one point last year, him responding to a fan on Twitter – who’d pledged to lock themselves away until his side project made more music – with a simple message: ‘very bad idea‘.

He also made pretty clear that a new Death Cab record was his priority for 2013 (fun fact: did you know that this very site is named after a Death Cab song?) and so I continued to disbelieve until I heard it from the horse’s mouth, disregarding mounting evidence that included the band’s long-dormant website whirring back into life. Even when the Coachella lineup announcement served as de facto confirmation, I still wondered if a reunion that had been denied so strenuously for so long was really happening; maybe it was a joke on the part of the festival’s poster designer, like how the guy who makes the Reading ones always used to sneak a Chelsea footballer’s name in there.

The triumphant press release and lengthy summer tour schedule that have followed, however, tell no lies; The Postal Service are most definitely back together – not that they were ever together in the first place, of course, with their west coast, mail-based modus operandi having provided the inspiration for their name. So far, the attention from press and fans alike seems to have been focused mainly on the shows; understandable, especially here in the UK, where their live presence was limited to a solitary appearance in London in 2003 – if memory serves, they were due to support Bright Eyes across the country that summer, but the dates were pulled. There’s been less mention, though, of the reason we’re all talking about the band in the first place – their lone full-length release, Give Up.

Maybe it’s because the obligatory reissue is fairly underwhelming – Gibbard remains pretty resolute on the idea of new material, with only two unreleased cuts making it onto the tenth-anniversary edition, amongst a slew of B-sides and remixes we’ve heard before. What is on offer, though, is the opportunity to revisit a record that has proved pivotal for Gibbard, his bandmate Jimmy Tamborello and the label that took a chance on it, Sub Pop.

It seems highly unlikely, at this point, that any calendar year will come close to defining Ben Gibbard in the popular imagination quite like 2003, which saw the release of both of his career masterpieces to date; Death Cab’s Transatlanticism, comfortably the band’s opus, dropped that October. It’s difficult to gauge the extent to which Give Up was responsible for the breakthrough that Transatlanticism helped Death Cab make; it’d certainly only be one of a few factors – you can’t use the words ‘Death Cab’ and ‘breakthrough’ without making reference, reluctantly, to The O.C., and just as pertinently to their move to a major label. It doesn’t seem like a stretch to suggest that The Postal Service brought Death Cab to a wider audience, though – that certainly proved the case for me, but if there’s similarities between the two bands, it’s obvious that Give Up also gave Gibbard the chance to flex some different songwriting muscles than he might usually.

Lyrically, we got to see a playful side to him, seldom afforded to us by Death Cab. ‘Clark Gable’ has him drawing hopeless comparisons between himself and the eponymous hero of the cinema’s Golden Age, that always have me in mind, rightly or wrongly, of Woody Allen’s attempts to be Humphrey Bogart in Play It Again, Sam. ‘We Will Become Silhouettes’ takes heavy subject matter – a nuclear holocaust – and deals with it breezily; “that’s when we’ll explode/and it won’t be a pretty sight.” Gibbard was always at his best at his most guarded, cloaking his feelings with clever wordplay and complex metaphor; on Give Up, he was at the height of said powers. ‘Nothing Better’ is fabulously wistful, a song that begins with amusing allegory, with reference to ice hockey and literal broken-heart-repair, but soon descends into more forthright, desperate statements of contrition.

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The very nature of The Postal Service’s electronic approach was always going to mean a shift in vocal style, too; Tamborello’s beats provided a more diverse, less predictable backdrop than the predominantly guitar-driven sound that Gibbard was used to working with. His voice has always been pretty divisive – one review I read of Death Cab’s Codes and Keys blamed it, and only it, for the band’s perceived failure to reach the ‘elite’ of U.S. indie rock, alongside the likes of The National and Wilco – and Give Up allowed him to change things up a little; on the brooding ‘This Place Is a Prison’, he less sings than whispers, whilst ‘Recycled Air’ is delivered with a poise and delicacy you won’t find on even the most understated Death Cab efforts.

It wasn’t just Gibbard who took advantage of the chance to display a little versatility. Tamborello’s earlier work, under the Dntel moniker, was pretty deeply rooted in considerably less mainstream branches of electronica, particularly on the downtempo, glitch-driven (and excellent) Life Is Full of Possibilities. On that record, the seeds were sown for The Postal Service in the form of his first collaboration with Gibbard, ‘(This Is the Dream of) Evan and Chan’, but that track, underscored by scratchy, erratic synths, was certainly less commercially viable than anything the duo ended up recording later (with the possible exception of ‘Natural Anthem’). Give Up saw him demonstrate that he has the ability to craft tremendous pop songs; it’s an angle he certainly has the capacity to pursue on future works.

For the now-legendary Sub Pop – who just blew out an impressive twenty-five candles on their latest birthday cake – what looked like a gamble, on the improbable pairing of a mid-level indie band and an obscure electronic artist, ultimately proved to be one of their great success stories; Give Up is one of only two records in the label’s history, alongside Nirvana’s Bleach, to have gone platinum in the U.S. It’s by no means the only time they were able to count an artist’s creative peak as one of their own – The Shins’ Chutes Too Narrow (also released in 2003!), Sebadoh’s Bakesale and Beach House’s Teen Dream serve as evidence – but those records, whilst hardly failures, didn’t meet with anything like Give Up‘s commercial success. Death Cab frequent arenas across North America and have had major-label promotional budgets at their disposal on their last three LPs, but only Plans (funnily enough, their weakest effort) has reached the same sales certification as The Postal Service’s one album, which received minimal funding by way of comparison; it’s a neat way of bringing context to what Give Up achieved.

Sub Pop themselves have joined Gibbard in making a clear statement on the future of the band; their online store’s spiel for the deluxe reissue suggests that this summer’s “long-overdue victory lap” will give “most fans their first (and last – seriously, don’t ask) chance to see the group in person.” It’s just as well, then, that the record that will dominate those sets sounds every bit as vital and innovative as it did a decade ago; there’s never been a better time to Give Up.

The deluxe reissue of Give Up is available on 2xCD and 3xLP featuring the 10 original album songs + 15 bonus songs including 2 brand new songs 9 April via Sub Pop.