Six Degrees of Give Up
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five other albums we've deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the records are highly, highly recommended.
The Album
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Indie-rock, like technology, can be so cold and alienating it often leaves normal people feeling a little turned off. The triumph of The Postal Service's wonderful 2003 album was its ability to make those crinkly computer sounds and delicate sad-sack sentiments seem warm, gathering and friendly, even kinda fun. If Radiohead's Kid A was the C-3PO of guitar-guys-going-glitch-rock (self-important, imposingly smart, Englishly austere), then Give Up is the R2D2 (small, bubbly, cute, blithely clueless but coyly determined). Ben Gibbard's band Death Cab For Cutie was just finding a wider audience when he recorded this synth-pop one-off with Dntel sound-painter Jimmy Tamborello, but what seemed like a lark became a left-field smash with Grey's Anatomy, America. Gibbard plays the lost-cause dude-diva, clinically dissecting his romantic/emotional dislocation like he's doing a PhD in Aloneness Studies, Tamborello gives him perfect little plastic pillows to dream on: The bed-head manifesto "Sleeping In" mixes strummy gorgeousness and soft, sunny bleep-step, the air travel revelry ""Recycled Air" goes from Eno-y woosh to brittle trip-hop as Gibbard catches feelings at 30,000 feet, and on "Nothing Better" Ben and Jen Wood duet on the most technical break-up song ever ("I've made charts and graphs that finally make it clear," she sings, like a Tammy Wynette empowered by Power Point). Sure, "Such Great Heights" has appeared in so many TV ads it's impossible to hear it without wanting to write something positive about UPS on a white board, but that actually enhances its theme of lovers floating in the abstraction of their long distance, theoretical love. Like Give Up itself, the song turns a sense of suspended animation into the feeling of unending bliss.
The Inspiration
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Give Up's "We Will All Be Silhouettes" is essentially an early-New Order homage, but the connection goes deeper. On this 1983 classic, the former members of Joy Division were post-punk guys being reborn for the age of ones and zeros. You get the same vibe on Give Up, as machines cheer up guitars. Bernard Sumner is a somewhat pushier singer than genteel Gibbard, but both share an errant neediness that melds perfectly with vaguely elegiac strumming, shimmering synths and gently hopeful beats. This deluxe re-issue adds classic 12" dance remixes of this period ("Blue Monday," "Confusion," etc), monster jams you imagine Gibbard and Tamborello listening to for inspiriting the way the Stones listened to Robert Johnson.
![Power, Corruption & Lies [Collector's Edition] album cover](http://images.emusic.com/music/images/album/118/376/11837651/300x300.jpg)
The Classic Singer-Songwriter-Goes-Synth Album
Indie Synth-pop Goes To The Beach
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The success of the Postal Service helped open up indie-pop in the '00s to funkier possibilities, but stylists of desire as good as Rilo Kiley would've made the leap to danced-up rock 'n' roll even if singer Jenny Lewis hadn't appeared as a backing vocalist on Give Up. On their first full-on major-label record, the L.A.-via-Omaha band embrace their adopted hometown's Fleetwood Mac/Steely Dan mythos head on. Former child actress Lewis is a down-to-earth Stevie Nicks, a diva you could hang with in at the diner, chanting down Hollywood Babylon as she parties her ass off. "Close Call" and "Moneymaker" are pure neon apocalypse, while "Dejalo" gets down with the sweeter vision of decadence ("My momma is an atheist/ if I stay out late she won't get pissed"). "Breaking Up" has some keyboard beeps reminiscent of the Postal Service, though where Gibbard often sounds like he's drowning in Seattle rain, Lewis uses breaking up as an excuse to break for the beach.
The Next Generation
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Home recording technology keeps getting cheaper and easier to use, further democratizing Give Up's vision of the bedroom-studio as emotional biosphere. From Passion Pit to Atlas Sound to Washed Out, the geeks-with-beats nation grows ever larger. Jersey dream-weaver Dayve Hawk mixes funk and electro, samples and songcraft, digi-beats and dappled guitars to make beautiful distracted donktronica. The songs on his debut disc always feel illuminative but out of focus, like late-afternoon sun through a dust-caked window, and if his ever-fading falsetto makes Gibbard sound like Robert Plant, his songs still pack a velvet wallop. The big blog-hit of 2009 was "Bicycle," a circular groove with a New Order guitar figure and choir trying to find its spiritual car keys. It works so well Hawk sort of repeats it on pretty much every other song. With a vibe this intoxicating, letting up would only be a letdown.
