HALFWAY THROUGH THE Postal Service's Give Up, Benjamin Gibbard describes a revelation in the London Underground. "It struck me," he sings on "Clark Gable," "that I've been waiting since birth to find a love that would look and sound like a movie." That's believable. The whole album rings with sounds reminiscent of clinch kisses and montage scenes from '80s teen flicks – a world largely scraped free of irony, a world where you can sing just about anything (which is how lines like "I touch you once, I touch you twice, I won't let go at any price" happen), given the right accompaniment. In "Clark Gable" girlfriends return to play themselves, and the chorus voices a desperate need to know that "there is truth, that love is real."

However, Give Up – the work of Death Cab for Cutie's Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello from Dntel, to which Gibbard has also contributed – gives us the kind of advice we're more likely to take to heart if we've already drawn our own dire conclusions about the existence of truth and love. It updates the soundtrack, bringing together the sonic flourishes of old-timey synth poppers and the observations of someone who's seen the new millennium and isn't that impressed.

Being at the point in the listening cycle when I'm no longer sure whether I like this album or it's just eating away at the inside of my brain, I keep thinking about Dan Clowes's Ghost World, a place where irony gnaws on the walls for dinner. There's a scene in the movie when Enid and Rebecca stand on the sidelines of their graduation party, discussing it in terms of the cultural phenomenon wherein badness is so bad it circles back around to good, which pretty much sums up why some people hate my generation. But more often I find myself having to admit that something is bad and I like it anyway, not because – a whole different cultural phenomenon sometimes referred to as bad taste.

That sounded like an insult. And the truth is that Give Up's cheery synth beats and bleeps at times move into nerve-grating territory. But it's become the one thing I play this week, though I know I'm ruining it for myself and everyone around me. Why don't they like it, exactly? Maybe because I play it too much. Or maybe because, while the lyrics are smarter and subtler, it sometimes sounds like what would have happened if there'd been a literate, sensitive bubble-gum machine with musical aspirations in Maximum Overdrive. Or like something you'd hear on the radio and begrudgingly adore, before savagely turning on it. The only hope for this one is not playing it too often. But that's the problem with sugar pop – sometimes you just can't stop. It only took Enid and Rebecca a couple minutes to realize the party really just sucked, once they'd chewed all the flavor out of the irony gum. But a successful pop song is a much more powerful force than some high school-sanctioned social function. If only life – and not just Gibbard's love life – could be like the movies, where no one outside of Chungking Express ever plays the same tune too many times.

How, exactly, does it happen that some pop songs transcend their plastic sheeting and precious, manufactured state, leaving us temporarily disarmed? In the case of the Postal Service, Tamborello, the man behind the beats and bleeps, draws his sugar-laced grids for Gibbard to sing inside of, and even though Gibbard never strays outside the lines, something gets through. Songs like "We Will Become Silhouettes" and "Sleeping In" offer sickly sweet observations concerning the horrors of modern living – the latter nodding to the silver lining of global warming, wherein we'll soon have the pleasure of swimming outdoors in November. "Nothing Better" fact-checks the narrator of "Clark Gable," reminding us all what love is really like while you're deep in it. When people tell you in such dulcet tones that everything is bad and about to get worse, it makes for a stylish apocalypse. Best, though, is the album's opener, "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight," which doesn't make me think of ironic updates or even the end of the world. Gibbard offers another, less starry-eyed revelation on the subject of love, and nothing in its synthetic perfection, shaded by Jenny Lewis's gorgeous, angelic backup vocals, takes away from the fact that it really, truly is sad when everything's over, no matter how many times it begins again.

The Postal Service play Sun/4, 5 p.m. barbecue show (with Cex) and 9 p.m. (with Cex and the Jealous Sound), Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., S.F. (415) 621-4455. $8-$10.