Pitchfork

As one half of the Postal Service, Jimmy Tamborello pulled off the improbable trick of getting Death Cab for Cutie fans to forget, momentarily, about guitars. Sure, Ben Gibbard played a few hooky leads and created a lyrical world where extravagant romance trumped rhetorical coherence at every turn. But indie kids could emotionally connect with Tamborello's chiseled melodic muscle, too. The burbling glitchcore he honed as Dntel-- where elegant polyrhythmic waves whooshed out into broad, open intervals-- found a wide audience that liked the idea of electronic music but was either aesthetically or ideologically repelled by what they perceived as its frigidness. This audience, like Tamborello himself, had little personal investment in electronic music's intricate matrix of stylistic variations, but heard in the Postal Service's overstated electro a recognizable emotional catharsis that squared with indie rock's definition of same.

From this point onward, lucidity disintegrates at a rapid clip, as Tamborello attempts to craft historically informed techno while recoiling from its unforgiving nudity, dressing it up in a variety of garish, mismatched costumes. He meanders through an array of house music offshoots, but seems primarily interested in the clicky, cut-n-paste concision of microhouse. Nuanced stasis proves a stretch for Tamborello's maximalist sensibility, and most of the tracks sound exactly like what they are: An apprentice's overwrought take on the stark, sublime depths of Isolée and Luomo, overloaded with guest vocals and concessions to hyperbole.