Week 37 - The Postal Service - Give Up (2003)

"I know there's a big world out there/Like the one that I saw on the screen/In my living room late last night/It was almost too bright to seee."

- The Postal Service, "  is Place Is A Prison", Give Up

"Keeping an eye on the world going by my window/Taking my time"

- The Beatles, "I'm Only Sleeping", Revolver

By mid-2002, two-thirds of the world had placed a call. In 2013, the UN claimed that a staggering 6 billion people had access to a mobile phone, exceeding the number of people with a working toilet by 1.5 billion. Factoring in land-lines and the timeless melody of the dial-up modem, I'd argue that every person alive today has heard a dial tone, or at least the sound of a number being dialed,  at least once. No other sound can claim to be as universal; not the sound of the ocean, the wind churning leaves, or even the flush of a toilet. If we define it broadly, only the human voice could possibly claim superiority.

Across a telephone line (or bounced through a satellite signal, as is so often the case), the voice is given an audible distance. The audio lags, the connection fades, and fidelity is lost. Across a particularly long/bad connection, your partner's voice can take on a robotic, 808s tinge that makes deciphering their emotions a sometimes baffling puzzle. Was that laugh genuine or mocking? Are they sad or apathetic? All the details get lost along the way.

I can only imagine what that kind of uncertainty could do to a self-styled sensitive bloke like Ben Gibbard, one of indie-rock's main spokesmen along with Chris Martin of Coldplay. Unlike the latter, who has transformed himself into a slightly more bewildered version of Bono, Gibbard has stayed largely true to his roots, keeping his sadsack image (one of the songs on his latest solo album was called "Teardrop Windows", another was "Oh, Woe") while occasionally injecting a bit of whimsy into his music or lyrics to avoid total monotony.

I'll admit that I can sometimes find the woe-is-me attitude a bit grating, especially since Gibbard's music often offers only a minimal backing for his usually whiny lyrics. I can sympathize with Gibbard's obsessions over the ambiguity of relationships and lost loves, but his wallowing comes across as awfully shallow. How much time can one man devote to feeling sorry for himself?

The lyrics on Give Up don't necessarily rise above Gibbard's cliches, but I think they're sharper and better realized thanks to the music. The album opens with what I can only hear as a slowed-down, synthesized version of a dial-tone, which is followed by Gibbard establishing his themes: isolation, the loss of romance, and deluded dreams. However, the persistent beats and chirps backing him keep these lyrics grounded and also reinforce the distance and isolation that serve as the song's subject. As I discussed before with 808s And Heartbreak, electronica serves as an excellent metaphor for emotional distance, and this album is obsessed with just that.

There are optimistic readings for Give Up's lyrics but, as you might expect, I don't give them much weight. You can read songs like "Such Great Heights" or "Brand New Colony" (the former being the hit lead single and the latter being the other song most people know/love from the album) as straight-forward yet quirky love songs quite easily, but that reading doesn't mesh well with the rest of the album, or even with the album title itself. Even a glance at the lyrics of the rest of the album reveal a character who's isolated himself in order to better fantasize about a particularly special lady.

Both the album cover of Give Up (a window viewed from a cozy bed) and a few of the songs heavily suggest either dreaming or simple lazing about. "Sleeping In" is all about wallowing in hopelessly optimistic fantasies, and "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" suggests the image of a break-up leaving one or both of the former partners lying in bed, emotionally drained. "Clark Gable" suggests that it's a fantasy or a dream thanks to its location in the London Underground, the only specific location cited on the album, and its wealth of oddly specific details. Aside from that, the entire song is about the narrator character desperately wanting his life to resemble a romantic epic while also doubting that it's even possible ("I want so badly to believe that there is truth/And love is real/And I want life in every word/To the extent that it's absurd").

"Clark Gable" is one of many songs on the album to revolve around the idea of a romance that is fantastic in both senses of the word. While that song is the most obvious about it ("And then I called you/I need you to pretend that we are in love again/And you agreed to"), both of the aforementioned hit songs of the album are all about such ideal relationships. "Such Great Heights" seems to be split between the flush of love-at-first-sight and someone desperately trying to use those memories to kickstart a relationship. The first two verses are straight-forward in their lovey-doveyness, but the third and fourth reveal that the narrator is essentially talking to himself or possibly writing a love letter of some kind. The next two verses reinforce this: it seems like the singer is trying to draw someone back to him with sweet little nothings rather than it being a simple love song.

Again, you could dismiss this as relentless, borderline pathological cynicism, but when you look at the album as a whole I think my reading wins out. Consider "Brand New Colony", which reads as a more escapist fantasy ("We'll cut our bodies free from the tethers of this scene/Start a brand new colony/Where everything will change, we'll give ourselves new names/Identities erased"), especially when you consider that it comes directly after a song called "This Place Is A Prison". An even bleaker reading could suggest a fantasy of mutual suicide, but that's going a bit far into the melancholy depths, even for me. I think a lighter reading, that the singer is fantasizing that somehow the world is to blame for the failure of his relationship, is a bit more straight-forward.

That failed relationship is the centerpiece of the album, the cause of the singer's fantasies as well as his self-imposed exile to the underside of his bedsheets. "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" depicts the moments of a relationship ending ("Your palms are sweaty/And I'm barely listening/To last demands") as well as the singer making a last-ditch effort to restart the relationship by visiting his ex's new apartment ("You seem so out of context/In this gaudy apartment complex/A stranger with your door key/Explaining that I'm just visiting/And I am finally seeing/Why I was the one worth leaving"). It's an uncomfortable image to be sure; clearly this break-up did not go well.

"Nothing Better" is similar; a phone-call between two exes with one desperately pleading the other to fall in love again. This is a quintessential break-up song, similar to "Last Duet" by Doug Paisley, and basically runs a highlighter over the title of the album. When a relationship ends, giving up can seem like the cleaner, better option, especially when compared to this kind of pleading. The ignoble end Gibbard's character has devoted himself to is also in "We Will Become Silhouettes" going from him lovesick and shuddering in a kitchen cabinet "screaming at the top of [his] lungs/Pretending the echoes belong to someone" to a fantasy about the outside air being toxic. The origin of the album's isolation and fantasy is obvious at this point, especially when you consider that this song leads into "This Place Is A Prison" and "Brand New Colony".

The facts of the album are blurred by the electronica melodies and Gibbard's high-toned voice, but the truth is still there. Give Up is all about the worst possible way to end a relationship, going from an ugly break-up to holing yourself up in a room, wavering between fantasies of things being okay again and never wanting to leave your room. We've all been there. At our worst moments, dreams and fantasies are just goals we've given up on, silhouettes of a future we aren't even working toward any more.

It's not all bleak on Give Up, in spite of the name. "Natural Anthem", the album closer, which is not only half-instrumental but also has the most straight-forward, unornamented lyrics, can be heard as the singer coming to terms with their ex. The lyrics only come in halfway through the song, after a strain of suitably anthemic music, and it's the only song on the album that doesn't revolve around the singer. Instead, it's a promise to do something for that ex ("I'll write you a song/And it won't be hard to sing/It will be a natural anthem/Familiar it will seem") seemingly as an apology for the biased little portrait the rest of the album painted of her. Alternatively, you could read it as an apology from Gibbard to his own past self (which would make sense of the "At least I spelled your name right" comment at the end) for the fairly dim portrayal, but that seems a little twee for my tastes. Even if it is self-directed, it still shows GIbbard's distance from the sadsack on the rest of the album.

What "Natural Anthem" reveals is the positive spin you can put on the title. When a relationship ends, you can't resolve things by visiting your ex's apartment, begging her to take you back, or even by screaming at her. You just have to give up on it and move on; relationships aren't competitions so you can't call that a loss. You have to get out of bed eventually, even if you have to crawl to do it.