Death Cab For Cutie - Transatlanticism
(Barsuk)
That which had always set Death Cab for Cutie apart from the what I suppose we'll call the emo crowd, for lack of a better evocative term, has always been two intertwining and complimentary traits: the first being Ben Gibbard's lyrics which, through descriptions of incidental minutia and a lifelike impressionism, explore the intimate in a way which is neither feigned nor facile. His knack for the Perec-ian sketch of the personal space not only imbues his characters and narratives with a tangibility that most lyrics lack, but also, allows us to feel a real communion with these scenes and people. Not every narrative is a quick and easy identification. There are no universal emotions or scenarios that weave their way through his stories. Therefore, we are not manipulated into feeling something for his characters because, like in most songs that rely on verisimilitude, it's happened to us. Rather, Gibbard creates his characters as mirrors; he builds personae that are not meant to be our doppelgangers, but are instead to be our foils. He involves us in the song because we are busy looking for how these situations contrast with us and not because there is some immediate pairing of the "I" with the self.
Complimenting these DeLillo-like piecemeal descriptions is Gibbard's extremely keen sense of melody, with obvious roots in The Beatles and Mac MacCaughan (as well as many of the other high tenors that populated the last generation of indie rock). Gibbard is able to do something that is often neglected these days, write unexpected melodies, and write ones that are distinct and catchy. I'll skip my usual lamentations on the state of indie rock and pop, but suffice it to say, this is rare. This sense of unexpectedness is carried over to the instrumentation too. While the chord structures are familiar, by not sticking to heavy power chords and distortion like so many of their contemporaries, DCFC are able to build a multi-layered, helical consonance.
However, while most of these qualities have been explicit parts of all of their albums, there is one thing which makes certain Death Cab for Cutie records better than others, and that is structure. Whatever it is about a unifying concept that enhances their songwriting, the albums that employ this strategy are undoubtedly stronger and obviously more coherent that the ones that don't. Take their first stab at this, 2000's We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes. As we trace the narrator's journey from break-up to acceptance, hitting all the stops on the way from self-inflicting nostalgia to anger to oneiric melancholy, our colloquy with the main character's journey is amplified by the fact that our contact with his problems lasts more than the usual three minutes. Because the narrator actually becomes a multi-layered character, there is way more substance than there usually is in the typical heartbreak songs. Furthermore, Chris Walla's claustrophobic production added the feel that the narrator was trapped in a small room, lamenting and depressed.
While the quality of the music and lyrics has declined since those days, the biggest thing missing from The Photo Album was the lack of the over-arching theme. Sure, it was a bit less subtle, but that's not what made it inferior, because much of that directness is carried over into Transatlanticism, but here, it is more subdued, or if that's not believable, it is more easily forgiven because each infraction is merely part of the larger whole, so when viewed against the back-drop of the entire album, lines like "When you feel embarrassed/I'll be your pride" and "You'd skip your early classes/and we'd figure out how our bodies work" do not seem so egregious.
Where We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes dealt with a loose narrative, this time Transatlanticism is bound together by Gibbard's explorations of a single theme, distance, both physical and emotional, although always dolorous. It is not a character that we use as a foil in this instance, but rather an entire set of experiences: not just a person who is far from us, but distance itself. Physical distance in songs like "The New Year" and "Transatlanticism" which echo each other with lines like "I wish the world we're flat like the old days.../There'd be no distance that could hold us back" from the former and "The distance is quite simply much too far for me to row.../I need you so much closer" in the latter. The character in the "The New Year" while describing a seemingly typical scene embarks on a bit of fantasy in the bridge of the song, wishing that a folded map could bring him closer to his object in affection. This idea is turned on its head in the title track though, as a fantastic description of a flood is described among the much more realistic and mature resolution that it is just too far.
Temporal distance is handled in songs like "Expo '86" and "The Sound of Settling". Here, it seems as if a distinction is being drawn between the character now and the character in his past, and although the sense one gets from "Expo '86" is that things used to be easier for him—"And it's strange/but they're all basically the same/so I don't ask names any more"—however, none of the cynicism is tinged by any regret revealing the mature outlook that the characters settle into as the album progresses, like in "The Sound of Settling," a High Fidelity-type song explicating the exhaustion of looking for love as one ages.
Finally though there is emotional distance, which is found in two varieties, one the natural distance that exists because one cannot know what occurs in another's mind and two, the distance that is created by lack of love. In "Lightness" the narrator is "looking for patterns in static/they start to make sense the longer I'm at it" as if trying to deduce the mental state of his significant other by her actions—"Your brain is the dam/and I am the fish who can't reach the cord". The chorus touches upon the dichotomy between biology and rationality "Oh instincts are misleading/you shouldn't think what you're feeling" and it hints at the emptiness that the two warring factions can create. Songs like "Tiny Vessels" and "We Looked Like Giants" are much more straight-forward in their examination of emotional distance. In both we have characters who are physically but not emotionally involved with their lovers and the problems created by such hollow relationships.
Even in songs that don't overtly deal with distance, like "Passenger Seat," Death Cab for Cutie draw it out by making the musical arrangement as sparse as possible. Thus united, the discourse one can have with Transatlanticism is increased. Repeat listenings are warranted, not just for the catchy melodies, but in order to piece the album together, to really explore the possibilities.
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