DNTEL - Dumb Luck Review

Much has changed since Jimmy Tamborello released the excellent, exciting, and heartbreaking Life is Full of Possibilities, in 2001. Laptop pop, the heading under which DNTEL most easily fell, essentially had its moment in the sun as a new and interesting genre, and now even the new Say Anything single has fractured guitars over a skittering beat. In the meantime, though, Tamborello finally received the attention he should’ve gotten for Possibilities, as the still significantly less famous half of laptop pop’s most (and arguably only) commercially successful act, the Postal Service....full text It's not fair to conflate art with its artist, or to assume that writers are always talking about themselves. As "Dumb Luck" opens Dntel's latest, with Jimmy Tamborello singing solo about how success is just a fluke ("it's dumb luck that got you here"), we shouldn't necessarily assume he's feeling sorry for himself over the gold-selling crossover smash he enjoyed as one half of the Postal Service, a project that began at the end of Dntel's last album as a singular collaboration with Ben Gibbard called "(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan"....full text When Jimmy Tamborello asked his pal Ben Gibbard to add vocals to a song on Dntel's 2001 disc Life Is Full Of Possibilities, he surely had no idea that he was launching an electro-pop powerhouse whose debut would sell nearly a million copies and become an advertising-agency staple. But The Postal Service's Give Up—which combined Tamborello's catchy, glitchy electronic beds with the Death Cab frontman's ingratiating, fey vocals—hit pop paydirt. ...full text In the time since Dntel's Jimmy Tamborello nudged his particular brand of melancholy laptop electronica into the mainstream as one half of the Postal Service, hundreds of copycats have turned up with uninspired variations on his signature sound. Rather than abandon his style on subsequent releases to distance himself from imitators, Tamborello has stepped up his game on this latest release as Dntel, pairing top-drawer indie singer-songwriters such as Jenny Lewis, Grizzly Bear, and Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst with sophisticated tracks that blend synthetic and acoustic textures with subtlety and grace....full text