TOPHER HEALY chats to American indie-electronica luminary JIMMY TAMBORELLO about his new album under the DNTEL moniker, Dumb Luck.

It might be a stretch to say that Jimmy Tamborello turned indie-electronica into something more than a niche proposition, but the Californian native has certainly done a lot to open the minds of listeners more accustomed to standard guitar-based music. With the 2001 album Life Is Full Of Possibilities, his Dntel project paved the way for the enormously popular Postal Service album Give Up, an extension of his collaboration with Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard that began with the indie-tronic hit The Dream Of Evan & Chan. Since then he has released an album of electro-pop under the name James Figurine, and now returns, after a lengthy gestation period, as Dntel with Dumb Luck – a collection of somnolent, moody and beautiful glitch-pop featuring vocalists Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes), Jenny Lewis (Rilo Kiley), Andrew Broder (Fog), Ed Drost (Grizzly Bear), Arthur & Yu, and many more.

Speaking of the almost six-year break between Dntel releases, Tamborello explains that work on the follow-up actually began quite early.

“I started it in 2002, right after I finished the last Dntel album,” he admits. “At that point the plan was mostly to sing it all myself; have it be more self-contained. I didn’t want guest vocalists to be what defined Dntel. But when I started it I ran into a wall pretty fast. I’m still kind of limited with my voice and my lyric writing. And I also have all these people around me who I like, and I like what they do. So it became a collaborative thing pretty quick.”

Forgoing the instrumentals that bridged songs on Life Is Full Of Possibilities, Dumb Luck is (title-track excepted) a totally vocal album. Given that Tamborello and Gibbard named The Postal Service after the method used to exchange digital song parts across the country, was the new Dntel a similar exercise in distance dynamics?

“Only on two tracks the vocals were recorded here (at Jimmy’s home studio in LA) – most of them were done wherever the vocalists were,” he says. Then adds by way of explanation, “I’m pretty slow making the music. I don’t have any real training; I can’t play any instruments…so it’s hard to sit in a room with someone and come up with something, because everything takes so long to put together. So really it would be pretty stressful to have someone standing there while you’re trying to make a beat.

“Also it’s easier to try new things and test things out – it’s only your four hours you’re wasting,” he laughs.

Given the notoriously attention deficient Tamborello likes to work on so many projects at once, how does he maintain a thematic thread for each? The first Dntel album cover featured an ambulance, and Dumb Luck has a curled up firehose… is there a mysterious emergency services significance to Dntel?

“It was pretty accidental that I’ve stuck to that theme,” he chuckles. “My brother takes a lot of the photos – he took the picture of the ambulance for the first one – and I was looking at his website with his personal photography on it, and I saw that picture and was just instantly taken. There’s something about the way the hose looks that felt the same as the music.”

Dntel’s Dumb Luck is out now through Sub Pop/Stomp – look for the review in next week’s Rave. Tamborello also hinted a collection of Dumb Luck remixes would be available later this year.

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