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Death Cab For Cutie
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Add to del.ico.us.Review Date: 2005-10-13
Did you ever hear the one about the band who were launched by a TV show? Yeah, hilarious isn’t it? Many artists have gained exposure through TV shows and TV commercials. Some are success stories, most are not. For every Dido there’s The Rembrandts (Roswell and Friends, in case you didn’t get the references). Then there are those artists who are better than that song used on the TV show – Gavin De Graw (One Tree Hill) and Remy Zero (Smallville) for example. And there’s that crowd from The OC – Phantom Planet and their one hit ‘California’ – a band that didn’t deserve even that much success. But The OC does have one success story, and they are called Death Cab For Cutie.
Like Seth, I’m a big DCFC fan, and like him I was partial to them before most people knew either of us existed. The thing about public exposure is that it means more people will go back and buy the older albums – and with a back-catalogue as strong as Death Cab’s that’s always a good thing. It also meant that they got a major record label deal. Their harder to find releases are now much easier to find too. But what about their new material? Their first step into the world of producing music for the masses. Read on…
Now that they’re on a major label, they have to make music that has a wider appeal, while not losing the qualities that made them appealing in the first place. Fortunately, they seem to have done that, well, sort of. Album opener ‘Marching Bands of Manhattan’ is a good indication of what the album is going to be like – more polished, more Gibbard and less Walla (Ben Gibbard being the vocal power, and Chris Walla being the creative, eccentric one). That said there are elements of the old Death Cab For Cutie here, all is not lost. The pounding piano is especially nice on this track. The second song, ‘Soul Meets Body’ sounds more like the Death Cab we all know and love, and could easily fit into any of their SubPop releases.
‘Summer Skin’ starts off like a piano-led ballad, but that description is soon lost (probably about twenty seconds into the song), when the Walla-isms are introduced. ‘Different Names For The Same Thing’ is one of the worst songs Gibbard has ever put his voice to, and sounds like overwrought sentimentality. The following song, ‘I Will Follow You Into The Dark’ on the other hand is one of the band’s best, and a definite album highlight. The more mainstream songs (to appeal to those record label bosses at Atlantic), ‘Your Heart Is An Empty Room’ and ‘Crooked Teeth’ have mixed results. The former proves successful, the latter falters when even the lyrics don’t stand up under scrutiny: “You can’t find nothing at all / If there was nothing all along”. Quoi? Heck, in places it even sounds like a Weezer rip-off, and that’s not a path you want to go down judging by this years dreadful Make Believe album. ‘Brothers on a Hotel Bed’ is classic DCFC, as is ‘Stable Song’ and ‘What Sarah Said’. ‘What Sarah Said’ especially so, with its droning melody and morbid lyrics it hits all the right notes. “Love is watching someone die”
Tracks to download: I Will Follow You Into The Dark, What Sarah Said, Your Heart Is An Empty Room
Score: 7.5
So did you hear that joke about the band that made it from a TV show? It wasn’t so bad after all. It just wasn’t as good as The Photo Album, Transatlanticism, or You Can Play These Songs With Chords. But it’s definitely not too mainstream to deter hardcore fans.
- Ronan Hunt-Murphy