Musicfor

It’s been a decade since The Postal Service released Give Up, since its charming and affable bleeps and bloops lent a sonic backdrop to college campuses and stoner bedrooms and car commercials, since Give Up appeared on medical dramadies set in Seattle and coming-of-age indie films set in New Jersey. It’s been a decade since Give Up was, in short, everywhere.

Given that it was simply a side project, a diversion for electronic music producer Jimmy Tamborello and indie-rocker Ben Gibbard, it’s surprising just how successful — and inescapable — the music was.

But unlike some pop music, its ubiquity was never irritating. It was the first electronic music album that I played in heavy rotation. I listened to it while stoned, while stone sober, while walking to class, and in my head while sitting in class. I listened to it at two in the morning and two in the afternoon.

Up to that point, I viewed electronic music as nothing but rib-rattling bass and thumping kick-drums. It was a genre ostensibly orchestrated for improving people’s acid trips or letting them uninhibitedly dance without a shirt (and pants) in a misguided notion that they’re enjoying a wonderfully practical and life-fulfilling experience.

But note-by-genial-note, Give Up disintegrated my preconceived notions of what electronic music was. It dissolved the seemingly insoluble conclusion that “electronic” music and “trance” music were the same thing.

Ben Gibbard’s clever and innocently insightful lyrics, coupled with his boyish vocals, indulged a sappy romanticism without overly dramatizing it. Tamborello proved through precise measurements and bright instrumentation that electronic music was appropriate for various situations unassociated with trance music’s typical warehouses, that electronic music doesn’t need to be something with a four-on-the-floor beat and listened to with a clear-plastic cup of vodka in one hand while your skull rattles from the inescapable bass barrage.

One of the appropriate adjectives for Give Up is “gentle.” The music is bright-eyed and wondrous. Lyrics are packed with simple little turns of phrase and messages about love, both the mutual kind (“They will see us waving from such great heights”) and the unrequited kind (“I am finally seeing that I was the one worth leaving”).

From bleak imagery of sleepy districts and tattered badges, to charming imagery of matching eye freckles, none of it is the least bit awkward or off-putting. It’s not Radiohead alienation or Nirvana angst or Nine Inch Nails depression or pop-radio sex-obsessions. Give Up is its own little brand of eccentric electronic sentimentality. Sometimes the atmosphere is clouded with heavier strokes, but it’s always with a subtlety that never detracts from the overall genial approach.

So everyone liked it, from stoners to jocks to English lit majors to science geeks. Its infectious affability made it the sonic embodiment of really good weed — instantly making people find life brighter and inducing an unwavering smile. Even in the crumbling-relationship back-and-forth of “Nothing Better,” there’s a cheeriness to Jenny Lewis’s and Gibbard’s jovial deliveries weaving in and out of each other. It’s a cute and fun approach to a typically depressive and solemn experience.

And while all that music is greatly appreciated, I enjoy Give Up just as much — if not more — for its connection to a specific time period. For me, going back and listening isn’t so much an exercise in experiencing in a wonderfully crafted sonic landscape — although it kind of is — but it’s more of an exercise in dwelling in a past so richly colored by the sounds.

Give Up isn’t a timeless classic, but it is a classic at a very specific time. Which is why, I think, so many fans fall around the same age and share the same general experiences with the record. The amiable sounds even parallel and, to a certain extent, symbolize the prolific rise in digital music and communication, which were rapidly changing how we all interacted with each other. Give Up emerged when Facebook was just starting out, when Napster was still a new revolution.

The problem with albums that capture a specific time is that they will always sound like that time. Transcendent is a word that will be attributed to Give Up, but only relating to the demographics. It’s not a piece of art that will span generations. It is permanently fixed in one generation.

But that’s completely fine. Most bands would love to be a generational staple, a cultural touchstone admired and absorbed by such a broad spectrum of the populace.

When viewed from that perspective — as a solid and specific piece of art that captured a single generation — Give Up is a tremendous record. Because it never strived to be anything other than what it is: charming, affable, lovely and at times pensive and serene. Those are the same characteristics of my life in that era, and Give Up will always remind me of that time.

It indelibly belongs to the mid-2000s. It forever belongs on Garden State and Grey’s Anatomy. It forever belongs in dining halls and friends’ ratty sedans, at a friend’s party, back in a bedroom so clouded in smoke that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face (both from the thickness of the smoke and because I was so high that I thought my hand was smoke). For me, it forever colors those solitary strolls across a street-lamp-lit campus. I will always inextricably link those memories and the music.

I cannot listen to The Postal Service without thinking about the past. I don’t want it any other way.

“Terrible Love” by The National is an adeptly composed and refined song, full of subtleties and nuances in both structure and sound. That caliber of work is difficult to cover without failing to live up to the original. But if a song is significantly altered (think Ryan Adams’s cover of “Wonderwall” by Oasis) and suffused with an original approach, it’s easier to judge it on its own merit and not as a mere reproduction. About a year ago, I found such a cover but didn’t post anything about it. The song recently crossed my path again, so I’m aiming to introduce anyone unfamiliar to this artist — Birdy. She’s a British musician born in 1996 (so yeah, young). Her debut album, Birdy, is full of covers of popularized indie gems like “Skinny Love” by Bon Iver, “People Help The People” by Cherry Ghost, and of course, “Terrible Love” by The National.

Her voice hovers just around her upper register with a breathy, whispered quality that, at first, implies a lax delivery that belies her voice’s raw power. It’s not quite Adele, but it has a stark resemblance. And she’s younger than Adele. While her songs are not her own, her minimalist approach (generally just her and a grand piano) lends each song a distinct flair. That flair separates the songs enough from the originals that the fact that they’re “covers” becomes secondary. Although, for the most part, she follows the original songs’ vocal melodies fairly strictly, it’s not strict enough to be a straight rendition. You know they’re other people’s songs, but they feel like hers. That’s the hallmark of a high-quality cover.

This song was inspired by “For Your Heart” by Divine Fits. The video’s at the bottom.

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“Find my heart, and you can have it,” she said with a mischievous grin.

The boy and girl were sitting next to each other on a ferris wheel as it climbed. In the distance, they could see twinkling lights of the big city. Neon lights of the town carnival fizzed below.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“In the stars.”

He thought she was kidding.

She put her fingers to his eyelids and closed them.

When she let go, and he opened his eyes, he was standing somewhere in space, above the earth. The world spun very, very slowly below him.

Sitting at a walnut desk was the girl. She folded her hands and looked at him with bright blue eyes. Slivers of silver moonlight were gleaming off her blond hair.

“So,” she said. “Now you can start searching for my heart.”

“But it’s dark,” the boy said. “How do you expect me to find it?”

“I dunno,” the girl said, shrugging, still smiling.

The boy looked at his feet. He was standing on something; it was like glass, but clearer. He could see faint traces of moonlight and starlight trailing across the surface.

“Where do I go?” he asked.

“Just start walking. You’ll find out.”

He started walking past the girl and her desk. He looked back, saw the desk was still there, but the girl was gone.

He went down a small ramp that bent left, then right, gradually declining.

He saw that he was in a passageway; the starlight shimmered daintily off the glass-like surface above him and on the sides.

More passages branched off the main one.

I’m in a maze, he thought.

Vivid neon purple lights streaked across the glassy surface, like light rails. He continued walking.

The girl, with her arms spread wide, rose above him, beyond the glassy tunnels. From under the soles of her feet, more vivid purple light streaked as she rose and dove. She swooped through the glass and tied vivid purple light bands around his wrists and ankles. She looped over the tunnel, wrapping the bands around him tighter.

“What’re you doing?” he asked.

“Keeping you safe,” she said. “If you take a wrong turn now, you won’t fall.”

“Oh,” the boy said. The bands curled around his knees, but he felt no resistance when he moved.

With the girl floating above, holding bands of purple light that wrapped around him, the boy felt like he was on a leash.

He walked down another ramp, into a huge glass room.

Innumerable hearts were lying along the floor, all arranged equidistantly, row after row, column after column. Periodically, a synchronized purple glow haloed them, as if they were beating.

“There are billions,” said the boy incredulously to the girl. “There’s no way I can do this.”

“Remind yourself why you’re doing it.”

The boy knelt on his hands and knees, began crawling, repeating to himself, “For your heart. For your heart. For your heart.”

He found it.

He kept it.

Divine Fits – “For Your Heart” Live – Schubas from GONZO CHICAGO on Vimeo.

“Gargoyle”

Written entirely while listening to “One Day Like This” by Elbow.

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The gargoyle was sitting at its normal perch on a tower high above London, as the gargoyle always did, and looking at the people below, as the gargoyle always did.

The sun was rising, sliding pink and yellow streaks across clouds and slitting sunrays between tall glass and stone buildings. The sun glowed sharply as it reflected off glass windows of a skyscraper.

After 352 years, the gargoyle started to move. Just the neck at first, trying to lift its head upward after peering down for so long. The neck curled upward, and the head arched back. As it did this, stone rumbled softly. Dust fell off and to the ground, clacked against some windows below.

Some workers within the building, the floor right below the gargoyle, jumped at the sudden sound.

The gargoyle then twisted its neck, widening and creating cracks in its stone body. It shook its neck, displacing more debris. Caked pigeon-excrement fragments fell to the sidewalk, landed on people’s heads. They looked up to see where the detritus came from, but the gargoyle was too high for anyone to its subtle movements.

The gargoyle experimenting moving its toes. On its right foot, it lifted its big index claw from the concrete base in which it was set. Wiggled its curved and pointed claw, clacked it against the concrete. Then it lifted its other toes, one by one, from the concrete, until the entire foot was free. Then it set the foot down, a few inches from the specific spot in which it used to rest.

Then the gargoyle repeated the same movements with the other foot.

The gargoyle decided to separate its right arm from its body. First it rotated its shoulder, felt the stiffness lessening.

With larger movements, the rumbling crescendoed. A few more people looked up from the sidewalk, but they saw nothing.

The gargoyle peeled its elbow from its flank, then expanded wide its curved wing, which caught a burst of wind. The gargoyle felt its arm pull backward with the force. The wind softened, and the gargoyle folded its wing back against its body.

Then the gargoyle peeled off its other arm from its body and expanded its wing, folded it back in.

The gargoyle wiggled the tip of its tail, then slackened the entire tail, and, feeling the rigidity removed, wagged its whole tail like a vertically-crawling snake.

With its entire body unencumbered, the gargoyle looked at the tip of a building in the distance. Its pointed tower was poking through a thin white cloud that had descended toward the earth. From the gargoyle’s perspective, the tower’s spiked tip split the sun in half.

The gargoyle had stared at that spike for three-and-a-half centuries and wondered what it felt like. What it looked like from there, if people looked the same, if he could see them do different things.

But it also wondered what was beyond that tower, beyond this city, beyond this country.

It lifted off, and it found out.

This very short story was inspired by “Exile Vilify” by The National.

—

“I do not enjoy having to do this,” said the mother, who was the head of the town’s council. She was sitting in a high-backed wooden chair in front of a long wooden bench.

Two councilmen, all of whom were wearing white wigs and ruffled white collars, were sitting on each side of her.

“You are charged with the murder of Sylvia Lithcomb,” she continued. “And both sides have spoken their cases. Do you have any additional comments?”

Her son was standing opposite them, behind a polished wooden desk. Unpolished silver shackles had been fastened around his hands.

“I did no such thing. And never would,” said the son pleadingly.

“You have said as much, over and over. The same empty answers again,” said the mother.

She leaned forward, rested her forehead in her hand. Her long brown hair, disheveled and dirty, fell around her face.

“We must discuss this,” she said softly, with her eyes closed.

The son’s brow wrinkled, and his eyes began watering.

The mother and councilmen went to a small room off the side of the courtroom. They closed the door.

“Exile,” said a pudgy councilman with curly white hair.

“Vilify,” said another, tall and lanky. “It’s what we do with someone who commits a villainous act. You are aware—”

“Yes, I am quite aware of the punishment, thank you,” said the mother. “Leave me to decide.”

The councilmen left.

The mother sat in a plush, red velvet chair by the wide window and stared at the slate gray and silver sky. From this window in the courthouse, she could see how the sky hovered over the town, seemed to lower itself and blacken and thicken as the daylight began fading to night.

After quite a long time, she said aloud, “I give up.”

She stood and gave one last longing look through the window, then returned to her seat in the courtroom. The councilmen looked at her. She looked at her son.

“Mother—”

“Don’t even try,” she said tiredly. She took a deep breath and looked at her fingers. The nails had been chewed down almost to nothing, just little frayed edges. Again, she inhaled deeply and held it in her lungs, feeling them expand, and then slowly let the air out in a slow hissing sound.

Then she said, very quietly, with a slight quiver in her voice, “Exile.”

“But you can’t,” said the son. “I did not do this.”

“I know,” the mother said, extremely quietly, so only she could hear. “I know you didn’t.”

Two councilmen got up and grabbed the boy’s arms and dragged him out of the back of the courtroom.

Seventeen months later, the mother was walking slowly through the town’s flower garden. She saw a gleam under a bush. When she crouched down to investigate, she found a knife caked in blood. It was lying next to a fox fur glove, which was covered in dirt and leaves and dried-black blood splotches. A councilmen had always worn it.