Ben Gibbard may've gotten a little embarrassed at the unlikely
popularity and all the time away from his musical day job that side
project the Postal Service roped him into of recent, but he needn't
have gotten too concerned. That collaboratory outing with
sentimentalist Los Angelean abstrackt-elecktro/soft-pop softie Jimmy
Tamborello really merely showed that Gibbard's writerly lyrics and
prettyboy crooning play real well when back'd with either emo-tional
indie-rockin' or cutesy electro-pop beatsiness. Most of that previous
sentence featured invented words, and, well, then, speaking of such,
Benny G thought he'd found a new term in the lexical jungle when he
boxed together tyranny-of-distance notions into the coined word
"Transatlanticism," meaning to mean that feeling where the space
between people seems insurmountable to such degrees it seems most
metaphoric of everything that's b'tween them. Anyone who's
done some kind long-distance lovin' will know the pain he's talkin',
and, well, even those DCFC fans who haven't are probably sentimental
and emotional enough to at least imagine that they have. And
for those devoted to this rock band's increasingly artistic gear,
Gibbard's a bard spinning pop-song sonnets that cause such
constituents of fandom to reel real deep in some crooning-along
swooning induced by the lithe lyrics. This here fourth album finds
such wordy words as "and together there in a shroud of frost/ the
mountain air began to pass/ through every pane of weathered glass"
and "I'm reaching for the phone/ to call at 7.03/ and on your machine
I slur a plea/ for you to come home" and "I wish the world was flat
like the old days/ so I could travel just by folding the map/ no more
airplanes or speed-trains or freeways/ there'd be no distance that
could hold us back," even if the bit where the sung words are at
their most convincing is on the piano-balladic title-track's winding
wind-up, as the repetition of "I need you so much closer" makes said
seven syllables say so much it hurts so good.
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