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James Figurine

Mistake Mistake Mistake Mistake (Plug Research)

By Dina Zwiebel
Published: July 20th, 2006 | 3:15pm

With several other projects in the works, it’s hard to know how Jimmy Tamborello keeps them all straight. He is a member of the Postal Service, Dntel, and Figurine, and has now chosen to add a personal touch to a pre-existing band name, resulting in James Figurine. While it is primarily an individual project, Tamborello enlists several guests on his debut under this moniker,Mistake Mistake Mistake Mistake, including indie darlings Jenny Lewis, Erland Øye (Kings of Convenience), and Sonya Westcott (formerly of Rogue Wave).

Mistake Mistake Mistake Mistake continues Tamborello’s electro-pop journey, playing it safe and rarely veering off the course of pleasantly upbeat and meditative electronic loops with breathy chanting vocals. The album opens with “55566688833” which, like most of its tracks, works best when Tamborello isn’t singing. The lyrics are pedestrian and nearly silly, but when he trails off and it’s just the music, the beat and, in this case, Westcott’s soothing repetition of the song’s title, the song mesmerizes.

With this solo project Tamborello reveals his strengths as an electronic songsmith, but he needs to leave the lyrics to Postal Service bandmate Ben Gibbard. Nothing on Mistake Mistake Mistake Mistake comes close to Gibbard’s subtle exactitude in the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights:” “I am thinking it's a sign that the freckles / In our eyes are mirror images and when / We kiss they're perfectly aligned.” Compare this to James Figurine’s overblown kumbaya ode to friendship, “Apologies,” the album’s first single. He sings: ”Forgive your friends / They usually don’t mean it… Apologies are gifts / Accept them with a smile on your face… Without them you’ll be on your own.” The drippy sentimentality almost makes me shiver. Nonetheless, if you can overlook the shortcomings of his words, the music of James Figurine will send you into a calming hypnotic trance.