A Long Time Coming: The Postal Service's "Give Up"

When I first moved back to Austin in 2009, my first job was at the Doughtery Arts Museum as the music teacher for their elementary age summer program. My wife was working just up the road at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden, and we commuted to the area. We ended up spending quite a bit of time that summer in the Zilker Park and Barton Springs area. Not a bad area to reacquaint myself with my hometown. Last summer, I have passed through the area with some regularity and found myself feeling nostalgic about that time.

Not that it was a better time: I was immersed in a stressful struggle to find a permanent job here while pushing to finish my Master’s thesis. There was a subtle feeling of liberation, however, that was embedded in all that uncertainty. Because nostalgia works the way it does, this feeling is what came when I sat down at a rickety picnic table at Flipnotics to enjoy an inexplicably overpriced cup of coffee and capture some thoughts about The Postal Service.



Although The Postal Service’s Give Up was originally released in 2003, the hype around its recent reissue late last spring would have the public think that is was an entirely new album. For those of us that missed out on it back then, it might as well be. When I admitted to my friends that I had never heard the album, it was a virtual record-scratch moment. I unapologetically follow my own path when it comes to the music I pay attention to, though, which (as I have stated before) puts me way behind on the hipness curve. Truly great albums eventually make it into the player - sometimes over a decade later!

And Give Up is, quite simply, a great synth-pop album (arguably “perfect,” to quote my Aiki Brother). It’s got infectious, playful melodies embedded within a musical landscape of surprising depth and subtle experimentation. Stylistically, The Postal Service recombines a variety of synth-pop tropes in multiple ways. Pretty much any electronic technique that has ever worked well up to the release of Give Up seems to make an appearance on the album: old-school analog, sampling, live instruments, looping, and probably lots of other approaches that I just don’t know about. The end result is both cohesive enough to be immediately engaging, but broad enough to satisfyingly unravel though multiple listenings



The lyrics, however, are the gift that keeps on giving. The quiet enlightenments about the everyday that flash through people's heads are given a simple and direct voice throughout Give Up. Using clear allegorical narratives, The Postal Service consistently toes the conceptual line between playfulness and profundity, mirroring the tension between liberation and pressure that surrounds the Barton Springs area for me now.



Although I picked it up on somewhat of a whim through word-of-mouth, Give Up turned into the definitive album of summer 2013.  Not only did I come to really enjoy it, I could put it on around almost anyone (including the Little One) at anytime and be assured of a positive reaction. The recent release also has a second disc with a few new tracks and a collection of covers.  This includes artists covering songs from Give Up as well as Postal Service covering other tunes.  It takes a band with some vision to cover a good Phil Collins song (an important distinction, because there are good ones and there are bad ones), but they pull it off pretty well.  Although this bonus disc doesn't quite stand on its own as an album, it is interesting, nonetheless.  Longtime fans of the band will probably find something interesting to check out here, as well.  For us newcomers, though, Give Up is worth the wait.

Summer 2009: P.O.S. and Chickenfoot

I think that it is pretty common for music consumers to use music to mark time.  For me at least, life is chronologically organized by the albums that were released during that time or by the music I happened to be listening to.  Sometimes, this takes the form of a mental snapshot, like sitting in an old blue Oldsmobile listening to Porcupine Tree’s Stupid Dream after working the door at a basketball game at the high school where I was employed in 1999.  In other cases, it recalls a whole array of associated emotions, like the feeling of uneasy freedom that I was living with as a freshman in 1990 at UNT as I drove back and forth to Austin on the weekends, desperately trying to cling to two lives with Trevor Rabin’s Can’t Look Away blaring away in my Subaru.

The listening habits that I engage in now purposefully capitalize on this tendency.  I never know quite when it will happen, but often I find that the music I listen to imprints itself on experiences that are attached to a given time in my life.  This happens most often when there is a change in my routine, so I often isolate my listening during the summer break.  When the school year is up, I take everything out of the CD player and replace it all with totally new stuff that I try to keep in for the duration of the summer.  Usually, by the summer’s end, I have some music that really stands out as belonging to “that” summer.

Two years ago, in the summer of 2009, I moved to back to Austin from Denton, where I had basically lived since 1989.  I was working at a summer arts program to make ends meet as I finished my master’s degree and looked for more substantial employment.  It was a pretty stressful time, in retrospect, with a lot of uncertainty and self-examination packed into every day.  Two albums that came to be the soundtrack for that time and, coming up on two years later, I can still get behind them.
 
The first one was given to me by an ex-student (and present blog reader) right before I moved.  Never Better by P.O.S., more than any other album, became the soundtrack for that stressful, sometimes frustrating time.  Never Better is an engaging, intelligent mix of introspective hip-hop and aggressive skater-punk that spoke to me on many levels.  It may have been the album of the year, in retrospect.  Although the entire work is spectacular and highly recommended, this particular track was the one that kept me going when I was feeling beat down by the nerve-wracking tone of the time (although the video is a little Wang-Chung-esque).

P.O.S. opened up my interest in underground Hip-Hop, although I have not found much else that compares to Never Better.  It really is a unique beast, and as such it marked that unique time perfectly.  If you are at all curious, I would suggest getting a hold of it.

The other album was hardly unique, which was perhaps the reason that it spoke to me that summer.  In the 80s, Van Halen’s 5150 and Joe Satriani’s Surfin with the Alien were both standards among me and my high school friends as we enjoyed the days of open campus lunches.  Returning to Austin in 2009, however, I found myself driving through parts of town that I had not traveled for almost twenty years.  The roads were physically still there, and, although they predictably were more overgrown and worn than the roads I remembered, they seemed haunted by past experiences.  It seemed fitting, then, that the debut album of familiar stadium rock from supergroup Chickenfoot served as the counterbalance for P.O.S.’s distinctive hip-hop.

Chickenfoot boasts some guilty-pleasure nostalgia-rock moments, and it seems very clear when Satriani takes over.  His distinctively fluid and melodic guitar approach often steals the show.  Despite its compositional strengths, however, Chickenfoot, as an album, is somewhat torpedoed by clichés.  In the summer of 2009, it was clear that, although Hagar and company are arguably good at what they do, it is simply was not the late 80s anymore – for them or me.  Chickenfoot served as a musical “safety valve” (after a fashion) that provided me with a perspective that was probably healthy for me at the time: to realistically look both at where I was and where I had been, flaws and all, as I returned to my hometown after twenty years.