I think I can say without exaggeration that the Postal Service is the most important band in music history. Okay, in the past five years. Three years. In the genre of indie rock. In the sub-genre of indie rock with laptops. In the sub-genre of indie rock with laptops featuring Ben Gibbard. On Sub Pop.
Okay, maybe they're not so important in the grand scheme of things, but for a group of their size and funding, the Postal Service have been surprisingly ubiquitous. Thanks to that "Scrubs" guy, "Such Great Heights" has been added to Hollywood's palette of trailer music, perfectly expressing that "dramedy about quarter-life crisis" sensation. The friendly resolution to the band's mini-spat with the actual United States Postal Service earned them national coverage, and a choice gig at the influential Postmaster General National Executive Conference (which, as you may remember, launched the career of the Beatles). 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. "We Will Become Silhouettes" is one of the flatter tracks from that album's saggy middle, an unsettlingly chipper song about living through the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. 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... maybe it could be the love theme from 56 Days Later.
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).
So in the end, We Will Become Silhouettes does little more than advertise for a revisitation of Give Up. 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. Well, okay, in the past three years.
