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Columns Warp + Weft Warp + Weft: A Death Cab for Cutie Retrospective
Columns Warp + Weft Warp + Weft: A Death Cab for Cutie Retrospective | Warp + Weft: A Death Cab for Cutie Retrospective |
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| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 11:56 AM | |
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The release of a new album by a band is always a good excuse for a look back on their catalog. Narrow Stairs seems destined for a lukewarm reception from the critical blogosphere—with the exception of the superlative "Long Division" and despite a much higher guitar-to-piano ratio than 2005's Plans, Death Cab for Cutie has not returned to the leaner days of The Photo Album. Instead, they continue to work with lusher arrangements and often more electronic instruments (and even a tabla on "Pity and Fear"), and Ben Gibbard continues to work the seams that separate everyday life from greater truth. It's that last part that deserves special mention, because Gibbard's songwriting has always been equally a subject of appreciation and derision. He's an unabashed sentimentalist (or, "a big fucking softie," as he put it to me in an interview in 2005), and so his lyrics often skirt (and often cross, some would argue) the line between heartfelt and sappy. But from the very beginning, his fine eye for detail and metaphor has often delivered songs that no one else could have written, songs that are closer to short stories like Raymond Carver's in the way they neither chronicle reality nor craft fanciful fiction so much as they build worlds outwardly similar to our own where the picayune becomes the sublime. We'll start at (or close) to the beginning with "Title Track," the leadoff cut on 2000's We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes.  Stream "Title Track" below:Hearing "Title Track" may come as something of a shock to anyone more familiar with Death Cab's more recent and almost precise-to-a-fault sound. "Title Track" sounds at first like it's coming from the bottom of a well, and even when the full sound of the song kicks in, it's still pretty mushy. But buried in the hum is certainly one of Gibbard's finest songs. On its surface, it's a simple hook-up story, but closer inspection reveals subtlety. The first verse characterizes the principles: she a writer driven by restlessness (the "crust of railroad earth that touched the lead to the pages of your manuscript"), he a homebody preparing to "hammer pillars for a picket fence." Their flirtation seems to be leading inexorably to a consummation, but the chorus slows the story on a single moment that frames and lends weight to the story. "Talking how the group had begun to splinter / and I can taste your lipstick on the filter," sings Gibbard, and in just two lines, with a few details, he's colored in the entire story. Here are two people from a circle of friends who have maybe never spoken much outside of hanging out in a group context. We all know how these groups are: Through high school, or for a few years, or maybe just a summer, a certain group of people orbit around each other, but nothing can keep these loose conglomerations together for long. People spin off into relationships with other people outside the group; people move; people change. The ones who are left behind are the ones who talk about the group splintering over a shared cigarette. Here, Gibbard uses the cigarette like director Wong Kar-Wai in his film "In the Mood for Love." It's more than a signifier of cool as it could so easily be and has been in countless songs; instead, it's a shared intimacy—a harbinger of things to come. Tasting her lipstick on the filter is like sharing a kiss, but it's also irrevocably attached to the self-destruction of smoking, and the act is framed by a bitter discussion of the loss of a social circle. The night spirals out in the second verse, the hero lost in a "wave of alcohol" while his "best judgment sign[s] its resignation." Again, the conclusion is foregone, but despite going willingly down, the protagonist knows what's wrong: "I rushed this / We moved too fast / Tripped into the guest room." It's not just a hook-up song: It's a song about the desperation that leads us to make mistakes we know are mistakes even before we make them. It's about the distinctions between friends, lovers, and acquaintances and how we can rush to erase those differences out of a desire to hold on to something that's slipping away. With "I Was A Kaleidoscope" from 2001's The Photo Album, Gibbard takes on a different persona, that of a man blindsided by a break-up.  Stream "I Was A Kaleidoscope" below:The striking thing about "I Was A Kaleidoscope" is how formally it's organized. The two verses and one bridge form three acts, essentially. Throughout, Gibbard uses several different metaphors to explore ideas about communication, miscommunication and blindness. In the first verse, the world is trying to tell the protagonist something, but he remains oblivious. As he walks out into a winter day, his "teeth chatter rhythms ... grouped in twos and threes / like a Morse code message was sent / from me to me," but as for what this message could be, he doesn't ask. He passes cars stuck in the snow on the way to his girlfriend's apartment, the slush soaking through his shoes, "getting colder with every step." Winter has stranded cars all around him, it's making him colder and colder, and his teeth are chattering and trying to tell him something. This kind of foreshadowing is a common enough thing in literature, but it's something seen far less often in pop music, which is often too concerned with the here and now to cast itself very far into the future. Of course, freighting pop music with this kind of weight can burden it, and Gibbard is (to be fair) often guilty of building narratives so precious they totter, but here his touch is light. In the second verse, snow covers his glasses, turning him into a kaleidoscope, unable to see clearly and not sure which of the several images of his girlfriend to address. She, however, solves the problem by shaking the narrator immediately out of his blissful ignorance as she starts to speak. It's here that we learn the protagonist has not been completely ignorant that things are going wrong, even if he's unprepared. "This is when I forget to breathe," sings Gibbard, "and all the things I've scripted / they sound unfounded. / And it's the look that you're giving me / that tells me exactly what you are thinking: / This ain't working anymore." But instead of pressing the story forward, Gibbard leaves it at that. What more is there to that narrative, really? It's a crystal clear evocation of the moment when everything goes pear-shaped, and there's nothing to be done. Instead, the song pulls back its focus in the bridge with a meditation on what winter means to kids, who work their mothers into a panic by "sledding down hills into oncoming traffic." And so mothers wrap their children up in layers until they can't move, then leave them "outside until their noses [are] blue." That's where the narrator find himself now, thinking he's safe when in fact the relationship he's in has slowly been freezing. That kind of metaphor—comparing a relationship to something moving inexorably towards disaster—is one he revisits on "The Ice Is Getting Thinner" on Narrow Stairs. Both of the aforementioned songs showcase Gibbard's ability to craft an allegorical narrative out of a few scant details, but on "Title and Registration" from 2003's Transatlanticism, he takes just a single moment and pulls out an entire sea of complications in a stunning way.  Stream "Title and Registration" below:The structure of this song is not so much a slow build, as it was with "I Was A Kaleidoscope," nor one that drops you directly into the middle as with "Title Track." Instead, it's a song with a reveal. At first, it's not entirely clear where Gibbard is going with it, as he sings about how the glove compartment doesn't really hold gloves, and how this is perfectly common knowledge, and how we really need to change the name of this thing that's in our cars. The sweetly elliptical melody pulls you along though, until the close of the first chorus gives you a peek at the linchpin of the story. In the glove compartment, there's nothing to keep the narrator's fingers warm, and "all [he] finds / are souvenirs of better times. / Before the gleam of your taillights fading east / to find yourself a better life." We all set traps for ourselves without knowing it, and anyone who's been through a relationship that has seeped deeply into their lives before ending has been ambushed by mementos in this way. Notes used as bookmarks, CDs with names Sharpie'd on them, Polaroids stuffed into glove compartments: They're there, just waiting for us to stumble upon them when we least expect it. These are the type of things that we can't forget because, really, we already have, and so faced with them again, the narrator here can do nothing but start drafting plans about what to rename the glove compartment so it can more accurately reflect its true purpose: repository for the ephemeral made corporeal. What's tender and gentle about the song, though, is how it shows that even when we've made a certain peace with the past, it can still haunt us. "There's no blame," sings Gibbard in the second chorus, "for how our love did slowly fade / and now that it's gone, it's like it wasn't there at all. / And here I rest, where disappointment and regret / collide, lying awake at night." The typical critical line on Death Cab for Cutie is that over the course of their career, they've gradually traded in the edginess of their early work for a more refined sound that has played up Gibbard's saccharine lyrics, upsetting the balance between preciousness and venomousnes. But honestly, you have to start looking at them through an entirely different lens beginning with Transatlanticism, and if you can accept that they're not going to be making another Photo Album, there are plenty of beautiful moments that come from stillness and maturity—rather than just youth and angst—in their recent catalog. "Brothers On A Hotel Bed" is a good example from 2005's Plans.  Stream "Brothers On A Hotel Bed" below:For someone who writes such sensitive and tender songs, Gibbard is sure a profane interview. When I asked him about "Brothers" in 2005, he said, "To me, I don’t feel like people my parents’ age have enough songs about them that aren’t fucking cheesy as shit." And sure enough, although "Brothers" is surely one of the saddest songs in Death Cab's, let's face it, not un-mopey catalog, it is stunningly clear-eyed and unsentimental. We've already seen Death Cab fit hook-ups and relationships of varying lengths into three-minute pop songs, but here, they attempt to follow the arc of a lifelong relationship, and succeed brilliantly. As a languorous piano line unfolds over a wash of distant noise and into a steady pulse of drums, Gibbard sings from the point of view of an older man, speaking to his wife. After lamenting that she may grow tired of him as they age, he carefully builds an amazingly complete evocation of aging; one that recognizes how the people we've been live on inside of us, often looking on incredulously at what time has done. "No longer easy on the eyes," Gibbard sings, "but these wrinkles masterfully disguise / the youthful boy below, / who turned your way and saw / something he was not looking for, / both a beginning and an end. / But now he lives inside / someone he does not recognize / when he catches his reflection on accident." Gibbard spoke about that beginning and end as being about the beginning of a relationship and the end of those other potential beginnings—the end of first kisses, first dates, etc. But I've come to think of the line more as referring to the beginning of that lifelong relationship and the end of your life. To me, that's beautiful: The idea that you can see someone and see in them everything you're going to have for the rest of your life. Okay, maybe this song's not completely unsentimental. In The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein wrote that "[w]e, living now, are always to ourselves young men and women," and here, Gibbard has transferred that feeling into song. Stein wrote about how throughout our lives, because we are in the present, we always sense a past and a future, and so have difficulty imagining ourselves as truly old (or truly as little children, for that matter). "Such parts of our living are never really there to us as present, to our feeling," she wrote. And so that reflexive lack of recognition in the mirror that Gibbard alludes to is perhaps one of the most unsettling consequences of getting older. But in "Brothers," it's not just another detail as it might be for another songwriter. As Gibbard winds through the second verse, where the narrator remember he and his love on a motorbike trying to go fast enough to break away from the earth while in fact they remained in the town where they grew up, the sadness begins to creep in, and it's a sadness born of what time does to a relationship. Even though very much still in love, the couple in this song says "goodnight from [their] own separate sides / like brothers on a hotel bed." It's a line that at first seems jarring, and I'll grant that it's a leap, but what keeps brothers at opposite ends of their bed in a hotel room on a family vacation is insecurity. They're family, and they love each other, but there's a quasi-instinctual social instinct to stay as far away from each other as possible. The bed, in that situation, is simply a platform for sleeping. And then as we grow up, the bed is imbued with all kinds of other significances and meanings. But here we find the narrator returning to that initial timidity, not by insecurity this time, but by security. Inside him is still the boy who fell in love with this woman, but now he can't recognize that boy in the mirror, and time has weakened their physical connection. Gibbard achieves all this without an undue amount of hand-wringing. He's right: There aren't very many songs that can look at this situation without being cheesy as shit. There's no Celine Dion ululating about her heart going on; there's no Michael Bolton crying out for salvation. "Brothers On A Hotel Bed" is realistic in its assessment of mature love—not dour, not apologetic, and not over-romanticized. Maybe that youthful boy of their first handful of albums is still inside Death Cab for Cutie. In fact, I'd argue that the changes the band has gone through are not unlike those that the protagonist of "Brothers" has gone through. They may not be showing their youthful fire so brightly, but Death Cab for Cutie have matured into a smart and subtle band, and one that has a way to go before their own December sun sets. |
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| Last Updated: Monday, August 18, 2008 at 10:20 AM |
