Glitch-o-rama

 

My favourite song of all time – hands down – is Dntel’s “This Is The Dream of Evan and Chan”. It’s so noisy and messy and still relentlessly beautiful. It resulted in the whole Postal Service project, which I like but which is much more straightforward. “Evan and Chan” will never be played on a car ad (it hasn’t, has it?) and I can’t help feeling that it’s my own little piece of musical real-estate.

Five years on, there’s another Dntel album and this time Jimmy Tamborello has a lot more famous friends to play with. Or maybe it’s just that his friends have become more famous in the intevening period. Dumb Luck isn’t an amazing album. In fact, it’s a little bit pedestrian compared to the transcendence that was Life Is Full of Possibilities. But there’s one brief period when it’s almost as good as the last album and that’s the title track.

I think the best thing about the first Dntel album was the Zen-like simplicity of many of the songs – fragments of lyrics, hints of melody, combining to form skeletal songs. “Dumb Luck” is a similar kind of song. And it’s one that I really enjoy. Perhaps you will too.

Dntel – “Dumb Luck”
Dntel – “This Is The Dream of Evan and Chan”