For three alternating nights in October 2023, Seattle indie rock star Ben Gibbard owns the Hollywood Bowl. Friday Oct. 13, Sunday Oct. 15, and Tuesday Oct. 17 will see the centenarian LA institution overrun with millennials — all attempting to relive the best aspects of our young adult and teenage years. The same will happen at the Santa Barbara Bowl on Saturday Oct. 14. Gibbard’s two most significant recording projects — The Postal Service and Death Cab For Cutie — are joining forces for the 20th anniversary of (arguably) the two most important albums of his career: The Postal Service’s sole album, Give Up, and DCFC’s fourth album, Transatlanticism. The latter serves as the bridge between Death Cab’s earlier, off-kilter intimacy and their subsequent tilt towards stadium-size sounds. It’s also the band’s final LP for Barsuk Records, the Seattle indie label they helped put on the map.
But we’re here to talk about The Postal Service — a somewhat larkish electropop project from Gibbard and LA beatmaker/founding dublab DJ Jimmy Tamborello. The two initially connected when Gibbard lent his voice to “This Is The Dream of Evan and Chan” for Tamborello’s primary project Dntel. The track, from 2001’s Life Is Full Of Possibilities, became an instant fan favorite, so they decided to make more music. Living hundreds of miles from each other, and with the internet still in its nascent stages, they relied heavily on physically mailing sonic ideas back and forth.
More: Ale + Frosty (dublab): KCRW Guest DJ set
Give Up was released to little fanfare on February 18, 2003 by Seattle punk/indie rock stalwarts Sub Pop Records. KCRW was an early adopter, and the band appeared live in-studio as a trio (Gibbard, Tamborello, and Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis) on May 6, 2003. In anticipation of the Postal Service’s imminent LA appearances, we’ve rescued their session from the archives and given it a proper refresh.
(Clockwise from top left) Jimmy Tamborello, Ben Gibbard, bedroom pop vibes, Jenny Lewis. Photos courtesy of Sub Pop Records.
The set illuminates the qualities that would go on to make The Postal Service one of the defining acts of early-2000s indie pop: Tamborello lays down crisp beats and warm synths, with just enough experimental dissonance to keep it edgy. Gibbard coats the songs with his high tenor, eagerly wrangling his many words into compact and insistent melodies. Lewis’ lilting vocals and additional instrumentation balance it all out, elevating The Postal Service recording project into a full sensory experience.
More Postal Service shenanigans in KCRW’s basement studios — complete with a cameo from KCRW Music’s Executive Producer, Ariana Morgenstern. Photos courtesy of Sub Pop Records.
In January of 2004, LA’s bellwether commercial alternative radio station KROQ added the single “Such Great Heights” into heavy rotation. The iconic music video received heavy MTV airplay. The band ascended into the indie stratosphere, and eventual pop culture ubiquity, with a legion of inescapable film and TV placements, abundant press coverage, and increasingly larger crowds for their live shows. By March 2005, Give Up achieved gold certification by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), and the album earned bragging rights for being Sub Pop’s second highest-selling album of all time (after Nirvana’s debut LP, Bleach).
Another auspicious cultural artifact of the mid-2000s, the AMC drama Mad Men, taught its viewers that the Greek word “nostalgia” roughly translates to “the pain from an old wound.” By the time the show’s central character, advertising whiz Don Draper, has put his spin on it, the word becomes more of a concept, yearning and existential: “Someplace where we ache to go again.”
Give Up (and Transatlanticism) came about during a historical moment that, on paper, seems strange to ache for. We’d just survived Y2K and the turn of a century. A sense of needing to feel grounded in American identity, post-9/11, was omnipresent. We found ourselves in the midst of multiple, dubiously-justified wars. And while the financial crisis of 2007 was still years away, there were enough early warning signs for some of us to feel increasingly nervous about the type of adult life we’d soon be launched into. Plus, it is always worth reminding just how rampant casual homophobia as a "joke" was in the 2000s. “Safe spaces” may have been a named quantity within certain communities, but for many of us, “safety” only existed within our capacity to access our favorite records at the push of a button.
“Everything looks perfect from far away,” you say? Maybe not. But, then again, plenty of new cultural and societal precarities surround us. And now they hurtle toward us at a breakneck pace, leaving very little time to process what is actually happening, let alone how to feel about it. How lovely, then, that nostalgia exists, and it gives us the opportunity to occupy a crowded space (or a good pair of headphones) with others who are probably nursing the same old wounds.
Diorama vibes. Photo courtesy of Sub Pop.
The Postal Service and Death Cab For Cutie will co-headline the Hollywood Bowl on Friday, Oct. 13, Sunday, Oct. 15, and Tuesday, Oct. 17. Plus, a stop at The Santa Barbara Bowl on Saturday, Oct. 14. The albums Give Up and Transatlanticism will each be performed in their entirety.
And for those in the Seattle area, you can check this out: Everything Looks Closer From Far Away: The Exhibit. Curated by Sub Pop, and occupying the gallery space at KEXP in Seattle from Sept. 29 - Oct. 29, this promises to be “An unprecedented deep dive into the worlds of The Postal Service’s Give Up and Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism, two records that began life as the indie rock soundtrack of 2003 and have since become RIAA Platinum-certified classics celebrated on a current 20th anniversary tour of North American arenas and amphitheaters. Bringing it back to where it all began, the pop cultural time capsule will feature murals, artifacts, large-scale installations, an in-depth timeline of both records and more.”
More: Explore The KCRW Live From Archives
The Postal Service: KCRW Live From The Basement tracklist
“The District Sleeps Alone Tonight”
“We Will Become Silhouettes”
“Clark Gable”
“Such Great Heights”