I know it's been a while since the last episode, but we're shooting for a new episode tomorrow night or Friday. For now, here's the first installment of a new semi-occasional site feature. Enjoy!
The Postmarks may very well be the most interesting band in the world. Mixing lush 60's and 70's pop orchestrations with a subtle irony and a surprisingly perceptive eye for love and all its many blemishes, they straddle two vastly different worlds and just seem to make it
work.
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In 2007, this Miami-based band released The Postmarks, an album of slightly melancholy yet very sunny Burt Bacarach-inspired pop. They followed this up with By The Numbers, which took this winning formula and added an admittedly silly premise: every track was a cover of a song that had something to do with the track number. That the album was a smashing success and garnered them a lot of attention is telling of just how much talent this band possesses.
So now it's 2009, and they have released Memoirs at the End of the World, which is strangely both a departure from their previous albums and a honing of the sound they've had all along. Bacharach is still very much there, but they seem to have added Ennio Morriconne to their stable of influences, and Memoirs is all the better for it.
The album starts with the stunning "No One Said This Would Be Easy," which I'm pretty sure is going to be the theme song to the next Bond movie. Lead singer Tim Yehezkely (it's a girl's name - see? interesting!) coos lyrics about love too ethereal to last over a propulsive spaghetti-Westernesque arrangement, most closely resembling some weird alternate-universe Old West Ladytron.
The excellent "My Lucky Charm" is less Morriconne and more Manilow-by-way-of-Motown, with catchy call-and-response vocals bolstered by a great piano-and-horns backing. "Go Jetsetter" has a similar feel, although it lacks some of the lyrical punch of the rest of the album.
The two real departures on the album are the deliciously psychedelic "All You Ever Wanted" and the almost disco-glam stomp of "For Better... Or Worse?" - both of which are still firmly rooted in the Postmarks world, despite how different they are. "All You Ever Wanted" combines an easy-going shuffle and a sitar in the verse with a straight-up Bacharach strings-and-piano chorus, complete with multi-tracked vocals and handclaps. "For Better... Or Worse?" almost crosses over into full-fledged glam, and the Ladytron comparison I made earlier would be even more appropriate here.
The slower moments on the album are also worth mentioning. The exquisite arrangements on "Thorn In Your Side" and "I'm In Deep" are gorgeous, and show the amazing depth this band has. Once again, Yehezkely's voice is the star, buffeted into the heavens by orchestral arrangements that would have made film composers in the Golden Age of Hollywood weep. Even the little touches on the album are impressive. "Don't Know Till You Try" moves subtly between suspended notes and a whole-tone scale in the verses and a more straightforward payoff in the chorus.
All in all, Memoirs at the End of the World is easily one of the best albums of 2009 and is a third album any band should be proud of.
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