July 14, 2004 | Posted by jp at 04:58 PM

snowballing

most of you probably know this track, or perhaps know of it, or have at least heard of the track. but for the millions that went right to the Postal Service album and only know Dntel by name:

Dntel feat. Ben G - This Is the Dream of Evan & Chan

This track comes on Dntel's LP Life is full of possibilties [buy it], and is also available on 12" or CD single with remixes [buy it instead]. you can hear the early echoes of what would become the parade of fanfare that is now the Postal Service, but it carries way more of Dntel's IDM/experimental electronic sound. which is the rest of the album, and also can be traced through various stages of evolution on a CD called Early works for me if it works for you on Pthalo records.

anyhow, like I said, most of you have probably heard this. but since a million people (understandably) jumped on the Postal Service bandwagon without digging into the musical backstory, this might provide a sound byte to associate with the name Dntel.

Comments

A million people is something of an overstatement. Sub Pop only has one official gold album to its credit, and that's Nirvana's Bleach. And those standards (gold and platinum) measure units shipped, not units sold.

ANYWAY, this song is awesome, and in my opinion better than the Postal Service tracks. I know it's not the case, but I like to imagine that he's at an Evan Dando concert in his dreams, which works with 1993 reference.

Does anyone know who the real Evan and Chan are? The girl from Cat Power?

Posted by: robot mark at July 14, 2004 05:20 PM

IMHO, several of the remixes on the single are better than the original. I'm particularly fond of the "superpitcher kompakt" mix.

Posted by: at July 14, 2004 05:23 PM

indeed, Give Up never charted higher than 149 on the Billboard Top 200 which would lead me to think that, while well known amongst the hipster set, the album hasn't even sold 100,000 units yet. Maybe not even 75,000 units.

Stellar album, nonetheless, though.

Posted by: Jason at July 14, 2004 06:45 PM

I don't know...millions could be accurate. They play "Such Great Heights" everywhere. I even heard it on that awful Nick and Jessica show. The Dntel album is awesome, awesome stuff. I just finally heard the whole thing this week and I've played it end to end over 4 times in 4 days.

Posted by: caley at July 14, 2004 10:56 PM

As of May, the Postal Service had sold about 250,000 copies. It's still #17 on the billboard independent chart, and I think it might be #1 on the "electronic chart" whatever that means.

So yeah-- it's sold a lot, but not millions.

Posted by: robot mark at July 15, 2004 12:45 AM

Epitonic.com (which I'm sure everyone knows but I'll plug it anyway because it's so good) has some mixes of this song. I especially like the Lali Puna one, it adds something cheerful and more loungey.

Dntel are featured on the front page of epitonic, and knowing how often the site is updated they'll stay there for a while.

Posted by: Patje at July 15, 2004 03:38 AM

I've always hated this song if only for the fact that it spawned the million fat emo chicks with Postal Service t-shirts.

Posted by: esco at July 15, 2004 04:55 AM

i just saw a write up of the postal service in "entertainment weekly", which is not precisely a sign of the apocalypse, but it's still creepy and wrong.

Posted by: Scotto at July 15, 2004 02:56 PM

Has anyone heard the Postal Service remix of this song?

Posted by: A Chair at July 16, 2004 01:49 AM
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