Saturday Morning

Penguin Cafe Orchestra's "Preludes, Airs and Yodels" VS. The Postal Service's "Give Up"

What a night Friday night was. Maybe there was a ton of people over and everybody crashed in the living room, draped over the furniture. Or maybe it's more of a family thing and everybody's over with their kids, who are all in sleeping bags in the basement, and the adults stayed up waaaay to late talking (like, past midnight even!). Maybe the alcohol flowed freely and there was a huge years-in-the-making cathartic confrontation after a fabulous meal, Big Night-style.

But now it's Saturday morning. The sun is shining through the windows. People slept in -- it's a little past ten o'clock (or, in the scenario with kids and families, a little past eight). Now they're just beginning to gather again and the host is frying up some eggs and bacon and the aroma of coffee is in the air. The fights from last night don't seem so important any more, and the foibles seem a little sweeter, and life is good.

So what music do you put on for this moment, the Saturday Morning Chill? Both of the albums in this matchup would do very nicely. You can easily imagine a bunch of cool folks sitting around the living room getting their first dose of caffeine and unconsciously nodding along to the tunes. Nice, very nice.

About the worst thing I can say about "Give Up," by The Postal Service, is that if theirs was the music playing for this event, at some point somebody would look around, distracted, and say, "Is somebody playing an Atari 2600 somewhere?" All the retro dings, bells, and whistles can get to be a bit much at times. Enough so that I think I'd prefer my Postal Service mixed in with other things, rather than all at once. But, for all that, it is near-perfect chill music. The lead vocals remind me of the dude from The Lightning Seeds, the female backing choral vocals meld in oh-so sweetly.

Stacking it up against Penguin Cafe Orchestra runs up against the ol' apples-and-oranges problem, since it's all, y'know, orchestral. Instrumental. Listening to the two albums together got me musing about lyrics and vocals generally. Admittedly, instrumental-only stuff is not my cup of tea. I like to have singing voices in my music, which is kind of odd, because I'm on my third listen of "Give Up" as I type and if you asked me to make some general comments about the lyrics in their songs, I would have nothing, absolutely nothing, to say. I could talk about the voices (and just did!) but not the words.

But anyway, to the match-up: Postal Service wins. No contest. While I think PCO would serve very nicely on Saturday morning chill duty, in the background, it couldn't hold my interest with active listening. Three or four tracks hooked me, out of nineteen. "Give Up" has a few duds, but other than that is consistently charming.