First off, a little background information on them. The band itself is comprised of 4 members: Lead songwriter Peter Berkman, bassist James DeVito, guitarist Ary Warnaar and drummer Luke Silas. They are all music tech students at NYU and have been in the band for about 3 years now. They play a form of music called 'Chiptune', which is basically where you hack an old video games console and use all the sounds from within it to make a song. But it doesn't stop there. They aren't making a song with just old console noises, they are playing drums and guitars over the top as well. So in effect, they are merging two different 'types' of music together.
Here is an example of what their music sounds like.
They aren't the first band to have done this but are definitely one of the most popular around. You might say that they have gotten the whole Chiptune scene up and rolling. People reading this will probably be thinking that it is just a load of "geeks" that have too much time on their hands, sitting in their rooms making plinky plonky noises from old games. But this couldn't be further from the truth these days. In late 2007, timberland used a sample from a chiptune song for a backingtrack in a Nelly Furtado song.
In my opinion, there are many many different reasons for why this band and genre of music is extremely postmodern. There are influences from all over the place in some of the songs, even to the extent of doing covers of some well known songs such as Holiday by Weezer.
Simply the idea of making music from old, unused games is postmodern, this is what you would call bricolage. This is where a piece of work has been created using a variety of different other ones. So the fact that the creation of the music was all made possible by using someone elses past work is a clear indication towards bricolage.
Here is a good interview that I found that should help you understand what it is that they do and how they go about it.
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