The Postal Service
Give Up

THE REVIEW

If the two authors of this project practiced their profession in Italy, this album would never have seen the light of day. The slowness and unreliability of the Italian Postal Service would have discouraged even the most tenacious of musicians.

Fortunately for us, Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamburello are American, and in the United States, at least the Postal Service (hence the group's name) works as it should.
The endless postman-driven exchange of demos with sketched, retouched, and finalized songs, which the two used for the realization of this project, could thus happen at a certain speed, and we can only be pleased about this.

Though the result of experiences matured in musical scenes far apart from each other (Gibbard comes from the emo band Death Cab For Cutie while Tamburello is the DJ in the electronic project Dntel), "Give Up" is the result of a fortunate and well-tested partnership capable of producing a sunny electro-pop.
Ten tracks built on a melodic electronic carpet made of drum beats and keyboards on which Gibbard's voice and lyrics create romantic and positive atmospheres that are a pleasure to immerse oneself in.

Think of Postal Service as an indie and renewed version of the New Order and of this album as the Kings of Convenience insisting on the sounds of "Versus," definitively hanging up the acoustic guitar, or the Notwist who have finally decided to release all the songs born from the sessions of the wonderful "Neon Golden".
In this way, you get an idea of a pleasant project born perhaps as a pastime, perhaps as a distraction from other activities, but without a doubt one of the most interesting of the latest American independent scene.