Give Up (Deluxe 10th Anniversary Edition)

Five episodes into its first season in 2004, Veronica Mars makes sure you hear and appreciate “Such Great Heights.” Veronica and her totally-wrong-for-her boyfriend Troy are driving around looking for his stolen car when the Postal Service comes on the radio. “I dig this song,” he tells her. “Yeah, me too,” she replies. They let it play out for a few more measures of beeps and beats before launching back into their conversation. The song plays again during the closing scene, when the girl detective is listening to a weird, round, portable contraption meant to play compact music discs. The scene is quiet and poignant, not only playing the band’s wistful pop in the foreground but contrasting it with the character’s recent glimpses of the compromised adult world. “Such Great Heights” is a way for Veronica to hang on to childhood for another four minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

Just a few weeks after Veronica Mars did the unthinkable and funded a feature-length movie via Kickstarter-- raising $2 million in eleven hours-- Sub Pop is reissuing the Postal Service’s platinum-selling Give Up in a deluxe, 2xCD set. This pair of pop culture artifacts point to a growing nostalgia for the golden age of prematurely canceled TV shows (see also: the fourth season of Arrested Development) and indie pop as cult soundtrack. The Postal Service's lone album has proved surprisingly influential, casting a long shadow over the 2000s. Not only did it show up in films and on television-- Garden State, Grey’s Anatomy, *D.E.B.S.-- * but its songs were covered regularly by a wide range of artists, from Ben Folds to metal act Confide to a ska act called Tip the Van. In commercials for Kaiser Permanente, UPS, and (for legal reasons) the actual United States Postal Service, Jimmy Tamborello’s bloops and beeps conveyed the idea of ideas: synapses firing, synergy synergizing, connectivities connecting. For better or for worse, for a little while, the Postal Service made laptops the new guitar.

Not bad for a side project. Tamborello and Ben Gibbard first collaborated on “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan,” for Dntel’s 2001 album Life Is Full of Possibilities. Apparently, they worked so well together that they kept at it, even corralling Jenny Lewis, Jen Wood, and Chris Walla to play on their songs. In the days before Dropbox and YouSendIt, they had to snail-mail tracks back and forth, so they called themselves the Postal Service. Released in 2003, their debut was a slow grower, but it had a long life and was still producing singles in 2005. What began as a side project… well, stayed a side project, but Give Up looms large in both men’s careers. Tamborello failed to capture that sense of evocative purpose on either of Dntel’s subsequent albums, although he has become a key member of the L.A. blip scene that includes Baths and Flying Lotus. Gibbard has released seven full-lengths with his day-job band Death Cab for Cutie, but many of his best and most beloved tunes are all on Give Up. Which, by the way, is Sub Pop’s second highest selling album of all time, besting the Shins’ Oh Inverted World.

Even in 2013, when those perfectly aligned freckles have faded, it’s not hard to hear why Give Up would be a hit. The album’s highs represent a perfect marriage between Tamborello’s synths, which sound like the first rays of dawn hitting a Mister Bulky, and Gibbard’s gee-whiz lyrics, which possess a mussed-hair whimsy. The best songs here-- not just “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” and “We Will Become Silhouettes” but also “Recycled Air” and “Nothing Better”-- evoke innocence and imagination in equal measure, a sense of the fantastical that persists as a defense mechanism against the terrible or the simply mundane. No wonder it appealed to Veronica Mars and seemingly every other teenager who heard it: Give Up allowed them to see their worlds differently. “Silhouettes” turned heartbreak into nuclear holocaust without sounding over the top, because who hasn’t felt like the last person on Earth? “Such Great Heights” made freckles more than something to be insecure about; instead, they became the stars that crossed lovers. Thanks to Gibbard’s twee imagery as well as his persistent use of second-person pronouns, Give Up reinforces each listener’s individuality.

By not recording a follow-up, the Postal Service never had to strike that impossible balance again-- they left it up to Owl City, Hellogoodbye, and too many other imitators to carry the synthpop banner. The Postal Service's dubious legacy often obscures the fact that Give Up is only a good album, not a great one. Those quirky lyrics curdle into something unbearable on “Sleeping In”, as Gibbard recounts a dream about JFK’s assassination and the environmental apocalypse. “Clark Gable” is a tortuously meta love song, although that might actually be the point. Sequencing is an issue as well: the album is so frontloaded that the second half drops off a cliff. How many people actually made it to “Natural Anthem”? But the highs are high enough to offset the lows, and I imagine listeners may have spent the last 10 years mentally re-editing the album so that only the good parts remain.

Despite the surprising success and durability of Give Up, Tamborello and Gibbard gave up on the collaboration. Sub Pop released an EP of covers and remixes in 2005, but it seemed more like a gesture of apology than of renewal. As a result, the band’s catalog doesn’t sprawl messily across album after album. Instead it’s neat, compact, containable-- which means this reissue doubles as a celebration of the album and as a definitive history of the band itself. The remixes-- by Matthew Dear and John Tejada, among others-- don’t add much to the originals besides length, but do underscore what precise editors Tamborello and Gibbard (and co-producer Chris Walla) were. Their mixes of the Flaming Lips, Nina Simone, and Feist, however, are missing, as is “(This Is) The Dream of Evan & Chan”, which isn’t rare but does serve as the root of all of every Postal Service song.

The duo covered frequently just as they were frequently covered, so the tracks by the Shins and Iron & Wine at least work as time capsule. The former’s deadpan take on “We Will Become Silhouettes” makes the apocalypse sound jangly and grim again, while the latter’s whispery “Such Great Heights” recalls that moment in the previous decade where folkies were slowing down fast pop songs. On the other hand, the Postal Service’s cover of Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” is awkward in both conception and execution. And finally, there are two new tracks, the bleak “A Tattered Line of String” and the undercooked “Turn Around” (which is, sadly, not a Bonnie Tyler cover). They’re fine showcases for Tamborello’s sophisticated beats and Gibbard’s heightened melodies; the production is crisp, the hooks catchy, but these tunes lack any sense of newness or discovery or connection. More crucially, it’s off-putting to hear the Postal Service re-create that 2003 sound in 2013. That’s the burden of any album that so completely defined its time: Give Up remains anchored in its heyday, and like all those canceled TV shows, it only reminds us how far we’ve moved away from that particular moment.