The Postal Service
Such Great Heights EP
Sub Pop

Since the dawn of the CD single, record labels have struggled to make them palatable. Expensive retail prices (much higher than an album on a per-song basis) and a paucity of truly memorable B-sides (a band's best tracks are nearly always on the album these days) create a double whammy that's made the CD single a throwaway commodity left to the teaming ranks of completist fans.

But Sub Pop is onto something good with the Such Great Heights EP, the pre-album single from Give Up, the much heralded collaboration between Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard and Dntel's Jimmy Tamborello. At four bucks for four Postal Service songs performed by three bands, it's the music world's deal of the century.

Predictably, the Postal Service itself leads off the EP with the title track, Give Up's best song — if you can get past its lazy similarity to Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle." Following the fairly forgettable Postal Service nonalbum track "There's Never Enough Time," though, the EP takes a dramatic turn toward the sublime.

The Shins chime in with a rocking rendition of "We Will Become Silhouettes." Under the Albuquerque, NM, band's steady hand, Give Up's musically bland, lyrically potent, postnuclear love song gets a new lease on life. The song's reborn as a porch rocker, and as soon as it opens with James Mercer desperately yelping "I've got a cupboard with cans of food, filtered water and pictures of you/ and I'm not coming out until this is all over," it's clear the Shins' reinterpretation is going to top the dull original.

Just after the final, falsetto la-la-las of "Silhouettes" fade out, we join Iron & Wine's Sam Beam on his porch, where he sits, presumably, in a rocking chair, picking his way through a gloriously slowed-down, stripped-bare version of the EP's bouncy title track. In the substantially altered remake, Beam distances the song from its Jimmy Eat World roots, sounding uncharacteristically unbluesy and more like Low, before a steel guitar chimes in at the tail end, replacing the bouncy electric guitar in the Postal Service's original. Its lilting, understated notes mark the perfect ending to this nearly perfect EP.

By timing the release of these two inspired, better-than-the-originals reworkings to coincide with the sell date of Give Up, Sub Pop risked stealing thunder from a much-hyped collaboration that didn't really work the way it was supposed to. But in their spirited covers, the Shins, Iron & Wine and Sub Pop wrenched victory from the jaws of defeat by creating a new model for the single. By virtue of having three acts performing the same songwriting duo's songs, Such Great Heights achieves a cohesion lacking on even the best label samplers, which are typically disjointed and unlistenable no matter how talented the acts involved. Thanks to this bit of ingenuity, any music fan who has yet to give up on the CD single format can check out three of the Seattle label's best bands on an affordable EP that also creates a new category of hit: the instant classic cover.

And while it seems unlikely to think the next Pink single could feature a cover of "Let's Get this Party Started" by some up-and-coming pop group, it's nice to pretend that maybe, just maybe, the record industry is listening.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)