The Postal Service: Give Up (10th anniversary ed.)

"The Postal Service was a prodigiously successful side project: a collaboration between [Benjamin] Gibbard, who leads the band Death Cab for Cutie, and Jimmy Tamborello, who records electronic music as Dntel. Mr. Tamborello sent Mr. Gibbard electronic tracks, and Mr. Gibbard shaped them into pop songs, adding words, guitars and other instruments. (Back in 2002, they exchanged the recordings via postal mail, giving the band its name.) Jenny Lewis, who at the time was a leader of Rilo Kiley, added backup vocals. ... They were looking back, in some ways, to the electropop of the 1980s, but trading 1980s theatricality for indie-rock diffidence. And their particular hybrid of wistful rock and synthesized pop ... turned out, over the next decade, to be a template for hits from Owl City, Passion Pit and others. The Postal Service had its own hit, 'Such Great Heights,' and steady album sales that have since exceeded a million copies. A 10th-anniversary edition of 'Give Up,' adding remixes and a few songs Mr. Gibbard and Mr. Tamborello started working on in 2006, has just been released" (Jon Pareles, "10 Years Later, a Onetime Side Project with Outsize Clout," New York Times, 6/16/13).

View catalog record here!