In the category of “best album by an artist or band who only released one album” it’s hard to think of a better one than 2003’s Give Up by The Postal Service.
So hard, in fact, that I turned to the internet to see if there were others that I was overlooking. Many publications have made lists in this category – Rolling Stone, NME, Paste – and most of the entries on their lists fell into one of three categories:
a. Cult favourites whose only album didn’t do well enough to warrant a follow-up, and whose fame (or at least, status as “cult favourite”) didn’t come until years later. See: The Monks and The United States of America.
b. Supergroups comprising members of already-popular bands, whose popularity guaranteed the only album a lot of attention, and whose commitment to their already-popular bands made the possibility of a second album unlikely. See: Temple of the Dog and Them Crooked Vultures.
c. Artists whose careers were cut short by tragedy, and weren’t able to release a second album. See: Jeff Buckley and The Exploding Hearts.
Very few one-album wonders fall into a fourth category: those who released a lone album by choice. Those for whom an appetite existed, and for whom sophomore sales would be virtually guaranteed, but who decided to move on to other projects. Lauryn Hill, whose Miseducation record was perhaps the hugest (and best) album of the late-90s; The Sex Pistols, whose business model was arguably to burn out as quickly as possible; and The Postal Service.
Okay, you might argue that The Postal Service falls into the “supergroup” category, but of their three members – Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, Jimmy Tamborello of DNTEL, and Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley – Gibbard is the only one whose band you could argue was actually “big” when The Postal Service’s only album was released. You could call them a side project, but hardly a supergroup.
Give Up is an absolute gem of an album. Phrenetic instrumentals by Tamborello, heart-breaking lyrics by Gibbard and backed up vocally by Lewis, and famously made by sending tapes of musical ideas up and down the west coast via the United States Postal service, hence the project’s name. It didn’t sound like anything else I was listening to in 2003, and it doesn’t sound like anything I’ve heard since. A few b-sides and cover songs exist (one of which we featured in this blog’s second week) but Give Up is the only full-length they ever did.
Nearly 20 years after its release, fans are still clamoring for a follow-up, but they insist it won’t happen. Playing a reunion show in 2013 at Lollapalooza, Gibbard announced before their last song, “Not only will this be the last song of the tour, this is the last song we will ever do.”
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The combination of keyboard-demo-type percussion with highly reverbed guitars sounded vaguely retro even when it was released. Now it comes off as kind of timeless.
2. Lines like, “I watch the patchwork farms’ slow fade into the ocean’s arms” are beautiful and poetic, but somehow the “ba ba ba ba” lines are just as memorable, and just as evocative of time spent on a plane.
3. Despite the lyrical promise of a “slow fade,” it ends abruptly, without any drama or unnecessary decoration.
Recommended listening activity:
Quitting while you’re ahead.