The Postmarks - The Postmarks (2007)

Not too long ago, I considered a move to Miami (ready, Art Brut?). As live music scenes go, it ain't exactly the next Stockholm, let alone New York. Better known for club-oriented sounds, South Florida also turns out to be the home of the Postmarks, whose self-titled debut may prove to be one of 2007's most sublime indie pop albums. (Move over, Rick Ross!)

The Postmarks probably won't soundtrack many coked-up beach parties (duh, other than mine). Tim Yehezkely sings in a breathy inside voice, with echoes of the Softies' Rose Melberg, 60s pop singers like Françoise Hardy or Jane Birkin, and Brazilian Tropicalismo icon Gal Costa. Instrumentalists Christopher Moll (co-songwriter with the 24-year-old Yehezkely) and Jonathan Wilkins draw out arrangements that enjoy the urbane whiff of lounge, Burt Bacharach, Henry Mancini, and Sunflower-era Brian Wilson. Each track has that "turtlenecked Euro beatnik chic" that Pitchfork contributor Nitsuh Abebe heard in Broadcast's last record.

Despite Florida's relative lack of seasons, nearly all of the Postmarks' songs share the Lucksmiths' single-minded focus on the weather. Cats and dogs fall in "Looks Like Rain", but Yehezkely brims over with the thought, "A gray sky can't dampen my spirit." On "Summer Never Seems to Last", fuzztone guitar, theremin, and an organ out of the sadder-than-you-remembered "God Only Knows" all support the singer's pensive sky-gazing.

The most elegant song from the album, the horn-accented "Winter Spring Summer Fall", swoons and rotates with the seasons as a metaphor for the heart; "I'm fall, fall, falling for you," Yehezkely devastatingly repeats for more than a minute like the bookish niece of the Flamingos. The repetition here and on shorter, harmony-layered "Weather the Weather" (see?) would also seem to imply some familiarity with house music.

"Goodbye" makes sense as the Postmarks' first video, outshining the rest of the album's gorgeous sighs with a deceptively sprightly tale of a young woman going her own way, her "don't leave a key underneath the mat for me" sentiment coming across matter-of-factly against the movie-score brass. With Air's follow-up to 2004's Talkie Walkie still not due for a month, The Postmarks is the best album of its kind since Hercules' In the Alleyway later that year. All they need now's to rope in Pitbull for a guest verse.

-Marc Hogan, February 12, 2007