The Postmarks 'By-The-Numbers' album

Letters. Remember those? You can’t knock the immediacy of email, it’s true, but most of us miss those hand-written communiqués from lovers, family or friends. Somewhere on the envelope was a postmark, testament to a passage across actual land or sea, rather than a rapid zap through cyberspace. “That’s why the name ‘The Postmarks’ stuck with us,” says Christopher Moll, one third of the Miami trio with that very moniker. “We liked the romantic notion of a postmark documenting a letter’s journey.”

Together with fellow multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Wilkins and singer/lyricist Tim Yehezkely, Moll crafts meticulously arranged, richly cinematic music with subtle nods to Bacharach, Brian Wilson, classic British indie and vintage French pop. Had The Sundays embraced a Baroque aesthetic or Van Dyke Parks orchestrated an especially autumnal-sounding Françoise Hardy album, it might have sounded something like The Postmarks.

“We aim to produce songs that sound like they’ve always existed and always will exist,” says Moll of his band’s chic, sepia-tinted output, and with Yehezkely and Wilkins on board, all is possible. Yehezkely, we should point out, is a gal with a boy’s name; a beautiful, yet inscrutable individual possessed of a soft-textured voice that’s simultaneously seductive and detached. When Tim Yehezkely sings, clocks stop, people listen, and ice cream refuses to melt.

How did an Anglophile/Francophile indie band come to form in the rock cover-versions hub that is South Florida? Let’s start by pointing out that, pre-Postmarks, the Miami-born Wilkins had played with Moll in Brazilica music/Stereolab-influenced indie outfit See Venus. Prior to that, moreover, Wilkins had been based in San Francisco scoring music for independent films.

Moll – born in the Bronx – had already established himself as a gifted composer, arranger and producer around Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. He also shared Wilkins’s passion for film music, and as Wilkins tells it, the pair’s friendship was sealed by a shared appreciation of the score for the 1973, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing-appointed gore-fest Horror Express, a flick they’d both seen as kids.

By 2004, See Venus was no more, though, and Wilkins was periodically DJ-ing at Dada, a West Palm Beach venue that sometimes had open-mic nights. One evening a girl with a boy’s name got up. It was Tim Yehezkely, of course, and when the enigmatic, Tel Aviv-born singer managed to silence, then enthrall, the normally rowdy crowd, Wilkins made sure to approach her afterwards, and then made sure Moll had a chance to see her.

“I think Jonathan had ulterior motives, actually,” chips in Moll, laughing. “But yeah, he spoke to Tim, and the next time she was playing he lured me out from my cave to take a look for myself. She was amazing. I fell in love immediately.”

That ‘cave’ Moll speaks of is his home studio in Coral Springs, North of Fort Lauderdale. You could call it an Aladdin’s cave, actually, for the place is festooned with vintage keyboards and all kinds of exotic instrumentation. It was there, overlooked by a poster of the sleeve art for John Coltrane’s Blue Train, that The Postmarks recorded their beguiling debut album scored for strings, brass and woodwind, released on Unfiltered Records in the winter of 2007.

These same elements, the love of lush John-Barry-esque arrangements, the attention to detail, and the willingness to constantly push forward and expand, came into play for By-The-Numbers, the newest music from the trio. By-The-Numbers is a collection of cover songs united not only by their ability to meld to Tim Yehezkely’s breathy vocals and Moll and Wilkins’ lush instrumentation, but also by the fact that their titles consecutively climb from one to eleven – the twelfth song is cleverly left for the Pointer Sisters’ “Pinball Number Count,” made popular by Sesame Street. The spectrum of originals is approached with a care that gives a tenderness to The Postmark’s interpretations of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “One Note Samba” or Blondie’s “11:59,” of the Ramones “7-11” or the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Nine Million Rainy Days.”

By-The-Numbers is in itself a satisfyingly complete Postmarks album, but it also points towards the future of the band, a darkness that still retains a warmth, a full range of emotion held in the spaces between words, alluring and mysterious and innocent and utterly beautiful all at once.

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The Postmarks - By-The-Numbers