(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan

Believe it or not, there was a time before the Postal Service (see "the Dark Ages"). If you were me during that time, and I think you were, you probably had a hard time listening to anything that wasn't the Beatles or U2 and you had yet to discover the joys of music pirating. When Jimmy Tamborello of Dntel and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie finally released their group project Give Up, it was a huge success. "Such Great Heights" was crazy popular, the hooks were great, and every song was so tender or ridiculous that it just made you want to give Ben Gibbard a big hug. At least that's how I felt about the album while I was growing up. It was instantly accessible, and anyone that didn't like it probably took his/her life too seriously. It was pretty amazing to me that an album as cool as this could just pop up out of nowhere.

Well, that's not necessarily how it happened. A couple years before Give Up hit the shelves, Jimmy Tamborello's Dntel released Life is Full of Possibilities, an electronic indie album with so much fuzzy warmth you could wear it as a sweater. In an album so full of abstract drum beats and modulated vocals, one song comes forward from the mist and delivers. That song happens to be "(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan," Ben Gibbard's guest appearance on Possibilities.

This song is so indie it's almost painful, but it's well produced and well executed. I love this song. I really love this song. I only heard "Evan and Chan" for the first time about a year ago, and I can still listen to it on repeat for a good long while. This song is a dream. The opening drum beat, buried in static, explodes into sudden clarity and the listener is taken to that familiar place that inhabits the deepest parts of our sleep. Ben Gibbard's lyrics are always so appropriately ambiguous and emotionally cliche that you just want to live in his world, that magical place in which we hold each other tightly and never let go. Like a real dream, you cherish every sparse detail that Gibbard feeds us and when the telephone rings, all you want to do is close your eyes and go back there.

-Kane