Originally conceived of as a yearlong series of
free monthly MP3s for digital-subscription retailer eMusic, the second album by
the twee Miami trio The Postmarks is pretty much what the title indicates: a
dozen cover songs with numbers in their titles, arranged in numerical order,
from Antonio Carlos Jobim's "One Note Samba" down to the Pointer Sisters' "Pinball
Number Count," a.k.a. the Sesame Street song that goes, "One-two-three FOUR-FIVE!
Six-seven-eight NINE-TEN! Eleven-twelve." But The Postmarks specialize in
ambient dream-pop in which there are no capital letters, only melancholy, so
everything becomes lullaby-like no matter its source. The band's willow-voiced
female lead singer, Tim Yehezkely, is a bit shaky at times, as on the spoken
bits of the Ramones' "7-11," and their rendition of The Byrds' "Eight Miles
High" veers from dinky to bombastic. But the group's devotion to the
homemade-symphonic bears fruit a few times, most notably with the Bond theme "You
Only Live Twice" and a nicely kitschy instrumental version of The Ventures' "Slaughter
On Tenth Avenue."