Ryan's Top Ten Albums - Give Up - The Postal Service

 Give Up - The Postal Service

Released 2003 - Genre: Indietronica, Synth-pop

Just wanted to start off with a shoutout to my junior year English teacher for introducing me to this album, truly a life changing moment. The Postal Service was a very short-lived group, with this being their only release. With Ben Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie fame) on vocals, along with producer Jimmy Tamborello, and Jenny Lewis on guitar and backing vocals, The Postal Service created a short-but-sweet ten track album that combines electronics with indie pop wonderfully. The album was released by SubPop who helped release several other notable albums like Nirvana’s “Bleach,” Sunny Day Real Estate’s “Diary,” and Fleet Foxes’ debut album (which we will talk about later). Gibbard combined his pop songwriting sensibilities with Tamborello’s electronica production to create a unique blend of synth-pop that became incredibly popular upon its release. For a time, the band “made laptops the new guitar,” with their solid production and catchy hooks. It’s unfortunate that the band didn’t continue to create new music past their initial release, as the sound on display here was really something special. Some of my favorite tracks are the opener “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight,” which has a killer chorus thanks to Tamborello’s production, “Nothing Better,” with its cool synth parts, and “Brand New Colony,” the one I heard for the first time in high school English class. While The Postal Service was short-lived, their influence was not, spawning a whole new wave of ‘indietronica’ groups and creating an album that never fails to rank in ‘best-of’ lists for 2000s albums.


-Ryan


Such Great Heights - Here is the music video for one of the more popular tracks on the album; “Such Great Heights.”

2013 Performance of The District Sleeps Alone Tonight - And here is a video of the band performing during their 2013 reunion tour.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gratitude Blog 3

Image
  Gratitude Blog: Day 3 By: Helen Ruiz Today was a rainy day, which usually translates into me having zero motivation to do anything. However, I consider today as a very fun & productive day. In the morning, after finishing my accounting quiz, I was feeling a bit hungry. I didn’t know what to get, but my friends & I decided to go to Culver’s. I’ve never had Culver’s before, and I am grateful I got to try it out today. I got a Sourdough Melt & topped it off with an Oreo & salted caramel concrete mixer! During the middle part of the day, I was feeling awfully tired & could not find any energy to focus on another accounting quiz. Usually, I gain energy by simply singing/dancing to a good song or two. Therefore, I am very grateful my friends remembered this & we played a song on Just Dance off of YouTube. After some dancing in one of the classrooms in the science center, I had loads of energy & was able to power through my quiz.  Over the summer, we had...
Read more

Gratitude Blog: Day 4

Image
  Gratitude Blog: Day 4 By: Helen Ruiz It’s finally Friday, and although I didn’t realize this fact until around noon, during my accounting class, I am very grateful that we are done through week 12! Only one more month left of this semester- yay!! Today, we got our exam scores back in my Principles of Marketing class, and I was very grateful that my 6+ hours of studying paid off to get me the score I deserved. What I don’t think I deserved very much was walking out of the business building into very icy snow hitting my face.  I’m not a big fan of the cold, so this was a not-so-great characteristic of today. Nevertheless, it was something I could deal with.  As a first-year mentor, I have to spend a certain amount of money for students in my class. Another FYM and I created an event together. For our get-together, we decided to have Bundtinis from Nothing Bundt Cakes. When we went to pick them up, we ended up treating ourselves to our own mini-Bundt . I am so grateful we...
Read more

Two Minute Technology: Machine Learning

Image
Two Minute Technology: Machine Learning Any learning entity - be it an animal, human or a machine begins with an initial set of observations - raw data . This kind of data can stem from interactions, transactions, information exchange, examples, instructions or experiences. A brain - whether it belongs to a human or animal, tries to look for patterns inside that initial data and then uses it to perform actions or make decisions. This same phenomenon can be applied to machines, using machine learning. Machine learning is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence. According to Arthur Samuel, a computer scientist, machine learning gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Another computer scientist, Tom Mitchell, took the same details of machine learning, but broke it down further in his definition. I find Mitchell's definition more fitting to describe exactly what machine learning is. "Machine learning is a well-posed learning problem: a computer...
Read more