In a 2006 interview with the author Dave Tompkins, the R&B producer Timbaland claimed he "changed the sound of radio." It's simple but true: Music before Timbaland sounded different from music after him. You could say the same thing about Dntel, albeit on a smaller scale. In 2001, he released Life Is Full of Possibilities, an album that reconciled twinkly, romantic indie pop with electronic glitch. A couple of years later, he collaborated with Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard on an album called Give Up, credited to the Postal Service. By then, plenty of artists had brought electronics into the bedroom-- they called it IDM: "intelligent dance music." Give Up wasn't intelligent. Actually, it was sort of dumb. But in dumbness lie hot, basic, and universal emotions. Boards of Canada were Ph.Ds by comparison; the Postal Service was for first kisses.
This was Dntel's Timbaland moment: If you knew how to listen, you could hear the Postal Service and their imitators everywhere, and the more your heard their sound, the less you could really call it theirs-- it seemed to belong to the ether. It was crisp, friendly, and progressive, but not too progressive; too progressive is frightening. It was everything you ever wanted in a last-minute holiday sale/corporate shipping service/laserjet printer.
Times changed; Dntel, less so. Aimlessness, his third album of new material, arrives without context, scene, or convenient narrative. Like Possibilities, the album is a mix of instrumental and collaborations with guest vocalists. In 2001, this meant artists like Gibbard, the dude from Beachwood Sparks, and Mia Doi Todd; now it means Baths and Nite Jewel-- probably the closest kin Dntel has in the contemporary landscape.
Here, though, it's the instrumentals that hold up best. Dntel's sound is of the Hummel figurine variety: highly detailed but essentially small. Adorbs, you might say. Jazzy, house-influenced tracks like "Bright Night"-- tracks that might sound huge in someone else's hands-- are recast as pocket-sized miniatures. About three quarters of the way through the overlapping, Philip Glass-style keyboard patterns of "Puma", the track drops into total silence for a few seconds, then flashes dramatically back to life with a Moog solo. It sounds sort of like a mosquito.
The smallness isn't a bad thing. On some level, Dntel continues to play directly into the Peter Pan-ism of people in their 20s and early 30s-- a kind of refusal to give up on the world at its cutest. Here he reminds us he may have also been partially responsible for that thing called chillwave. But think of the way your smartphone is basically a tiny computer: Smallness is a metaphor for cute, but also for efficiency and containment.
Measuring Dntel based on his past achievements is a cruel but natural response: Given that he changed the conversation once, isn't it reasonable we might assume he'd do it again? When answering a question about "new directions" for our Inbox feature, I wrote that today's innovation is tomorrow's cliché. I stand by that. The question I have when I sit down and listen to Aimlessness is: What's left of an artist once the novelty of his work falls away? No doubt there are all kinds of hammy, vague answers like "songcraft." I wouldn't contest the assertion that one of the reasons the Postal Service record still sounds great is that its form was novel but its content was classic. Here, I'm not sure. There's an insularity to Dntel's world that, in my mind, puts it slightly beyond criticism. If you go to his Tumblr, you'll see him holding up printouts of setlists from his online radio shows. I find this very endearing, and it mostly leads me to the idea that he's a guy who got semifamous almost by accident and would like nothing more than to just stay right where he is doing just what he wants to do.
Certain artists make long and fruitful careers out of repeating themselves. Electronic music is just starting to reach the point where nostalgia is a viable option. When reviewing the reissue of Life is Full of Possibilities, my colleague Matt LeMay said "this was once the sound of the future." Maybe there'll come a time when we can appreciate Aimlessness as the sound of the past. Until then, I defer as lovingly as I can to its title.
