DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE

"If the silence takes you, then I hope it takes me too."

Years active: Genres: Related artists:
1997 - Present Indie rock, pop/rock The Postal Service (TBC)

Line-up: Started out as a solo project for Ben Gibbard (vocals, guitar, keyboards, drums in the early days), and after the debut EP soon expanded into a full band with the addition of Chris Walla (guitar, keyboards, production), Nick Harmer (bass) and Nathan Good (drums). Good left in 2000 (during the recording of We Have the Facts...) and was replaced by Michael Schorr for a few years. Schorr left in 2003 and Jason McGerr took his place in drums, completing the "classic" quartet line-up (pictured above). Walla left in 2014 and after a brief stint as a formal three-piece, the band eventually recruited tour musicians Dave Depper (guitar) and Zac Rae (keyboards) as official members.

Intro TBC!

Main discography:

Other releases:

Main discography

SOMETHING ABOUT AIRPLANES

Release year: Rating: Key tracks:
1998 7 "Bend to Squares", "President of What?", "Amputations"

1) Bend to Squares; 2) President of What?; 3) Champagne from a Paper Cup; 4) Your Bruise; 5) Pictures in an Exhibition; 6) Sleep Spent; 7) The Face That Launched 1,000 Shits; 8) Amputations; 9) Fake Frowns; 10) Line of Best Fit

Intimate and moody; a solid band who still have not fully figured out their songwriting but already creating sparks.

If you want to describe Something About Airplanes succinctly, it's that it sounds like an album by a small town band. That's not a negative descriptor, nor do I even know how big or small Bellingham (Washington, USA) was in the late nineties so it could be all wrong. But Something About Airplanes has got that sound - scruffy and homegrown, devised in the bedrooms of small flats and brought to life in the tiny stages of dive bar open mic nights. The sound quality isn't too far from the cassette demos of You Can Play These Songs with Chords - or the live disc that comes with the 10th anniversary version I've got here - and so the album sounds like a series of live takes recorded in ramshackle rooms, but that fits so well with its forlorn and melancholy songs full of pathos. Perhaps above all, you can hear the sparks behind the young, talented people figuring their way forward but already beginning to tap onto something special. Now, a lot of this just idyllic romanticism by an overimaginative music nerd - and likely heavily influenced by the very enthusiastic and vividly depictive liner notes from Harvey Danger's Sean Nelson on the above mentioned reissue - but the songs also tell their own tale. Death Cab may not be quite fully-formed yet but the signs are obvious to anyone who's paying attention.

There's plenty of familiar Death Cab elements throughout Something About Airplanes but they're all still a little raw and rough in ways that have a recognisable impact, which isn't necessarily a bad thing when it comes to the album establishing its own identity apart from the rest. Gibbard's lyrics are less verbal and more crucually less narrative, leaving much more to the listener's imagination to figure out how things ended up in the sorry state that most of these vignettes depict. The music bringing those words to life is similarly less decorated, centered entirely around the tight interplay between Gibbard and Walla's oft-distorted dual guitars and Harmer and Good's tight rhythm section, locking each song into a particular setting they stick for the rest of their duration. Most of it's mid-tempo and moody, not quite heartbroken or sad but still slowly walking through a rainy day in an empty street. With all these elements combined, the overall feel of Something About Airplanes is somewhere between slowcore and midwest emo, with the occasional louder burst of guitar or a slightly bouncier tempo shift moving it away from that direction. It's a restrained record full of slowburners and so may demand a bit of patience - but once those hooks have sunk in slowly they're in there firmly.

In terms of the songs themselves, half of this is identical to You Can Play These Songs with Chords, with the band simply re-recording Gibbard's original demos one-to-one (minus the obvious technical flubs). Which is fair play: those original demo songs were for most part worth keeping and though these new versions aren't all too different at all, they are in all places simply executed better. The early show stormer "President of What?" now genuinely rocks out a bit and establishes itself fairly quickly as one of the album's obvious lead-in cuts that pulls the listener eagerly deeper into the record, the quietly grand closer "Line of Best Fit" now ends more dramatically with a few minutes of repeated melodies and ultimately a wave of feedback, the upbeat "Pictures in an Exhibition" now jumps out even louder as one of the album's few moments of real energy, and so forth. The anthemic "Amputations" perhaps gets the most effective facelift of them all - it was already one of the best songs of the demo tape and as it now comes with a bit of a bolder step and firmer touch, its achingly soaring chorus sounds even greater and places it as the highlight of the album. You could easily imagine it at home with all the other mid-late 90s alt rock staples and is the best example of the louder and slightly more grunge-indebted sound that the band would soon shake off while discovering what works best for them. In a way it's a shame this development kind of ended here - Death Cab could have been a great guitar rock band, too, if they had wanted to.

The new songs like "Sleep Spent" and "Your Bruise" simply continue on from the early recordings, acting as an extension for them rather than as a direct evolution. The opener "Bend to Squares" is of particular note simply because of how gracefully beautiful it sounds, right down to its tender intro of cello and picked acoustic guitar: a lot of Something About Airplanes sounds lovely to some degree or another, but in "Bend to Squares" specifically you can hear the genesis of the many heartbreaking ballads and arresting slow pieces that would become a regular part of the band's armoury in the future. The hurrying and manic "Fake Frowns", on the other hand, sounds more directly like the genesis of the countless bands who heard these late 90s indie records a decade later and would find their calling through them, and it's almost eery how reminiscent it is to so many young groups I've heard since then, but it takes away none of the charm of the "original". The strange duck of the brand new material is "The Face that Launched 1,000 Shits", a cover of Death Cab's long-forgotten local peers The Revolutionary Hydra which was added to the album as a last minute choice to literally bulk up the tracklisting and to pay tribute to the band's friends in the scene. Its woozy and hazy soundscape full of loopy organs and filtered vocals breaks away from the rest of the record and makes it an alluring and intriguing part of the record's flow - it's also just a really good song with a tight melody, and though the original is so obscure that I don't know how it goes because I can't even find it, Death Cab have managed to merge it with their own sound well enough that you could be easily forgiven for thinking it's an original.

One reason I might be so positive towards "The Death That Launched 1,000 Shits" - typically shrugged off as the album's weak link as covers usually are - is because it breaks out a little bit thanks to its unique vibe. There's a lot to appreciate and even love with Something About Airplanes and it's truly one of those albums that unfolds over time rather than immediately, but then that's also partly in due how a lot of it is more or less the same thing with slightly different melodies. It's a mood piece more than a collection of highlights, the kind of sustained atmosphere that sounds like it could be someone else's favourite album of all time if that mood happened to struck them when they neeed it. That isn't to say that it's all samey but the differences are often in the small details that exist outside Gibbard's songwriting - which is the album's relative weak point (comparatively speaking). Death Cab are already a solid band but Gibbard is still working out his voice as a writer, and though he's doing a good job here the simple fact is that he'd be doing a better job already on the next album as his gift for melody and arrangement became more diverse and having a band around him to throw off ideas with became more of a reality than it was when the bulk of this material was written. There are very few individual songs here that I would class as Death Cab essentials ("Your Bruise" and "Amputations" would make it to a hypothetical Flint Essentials comp though) and even after years of listening I still struggle to recall in most cases which song is which until they begin playing, and that's ultimately the reason why the album ends up with the rating it has. But in terms of creating a mood to sink into, it's still one of Death Cab's most arresting in that regard because in comparison to all the others, this is by and far their most intimate record - and that can be a little special too.

The 10th anniversary edition of the album comes with a bonus live disc, featuring one of the band's first live concerts (sharing the night with many other small bands like them, including the aforementioned The Revolutionary Hydra). The banter is charmingly awkward, the sound quality is quite good and the songs are played well and close to the recorded versions - which isn't surprising given the recorded versions are basically studio live recordings anyway. It's not the kind of extra material that should necessary convince you to get this edition specifically, but it helps to build a full picture of Death Cab circa 1997-1998 and works as a companion piece to not just the album, but perhaps even moreso to Nelson's liner notes that go into the evening in great detail. Nelson himself also features in the live disc's sole "only on this release" snag, a haphazard cover of The Smiths' "Sweet and Tender Hooligan": the arrangement is a little jollier but recognisably the same song, but with Death Cab relegated to a backing band for Nelson it's arguably the least essential part of the entire set. It's a nice little bonus that helps to colour the context around the album, but nothing genuinely important.

Physically: Clear jewel case housed within a slipcase/o-card. The o-card has a hole for the boat on the cover, which is actually part of the CD booklet cover that features the boat in the center of a wider set of ripples in bold blue and white - and those ripples then are actually on a translucent plastic sheet that acts as the booklet's covers, so once you pull back another layer you just have the boat in blank white space. It's neat! The paper in the booklet is also textured which is quite fun. The 10th anniversary CD edition was also a limited, numbered edition - mine's #8489.

Other releases

YOU CAN PLAY THESE SONGS WITH CHORDS

Release year: Rating: Key tracks:
1997 7 "That's Incentive", "Wait", "Army Corps of Architects"

1) President of What?; 2) Champagne from a Paper Cup; 3) Pictures in an Exhibition; 4) Hindsight; 5) That's Incentive; 6) Amputations; 7) Two Cars; 8) Line of Best Fit; 2002 Reissue Bonus Tracks: 9) This Charming Man; 10) TV Trays; 11) New Candles; 12) Tomorrow; 13) Flustered/Hey Tomcat!; 14) State Street Residential; 15) Wait; 16) Prove My Hypotheses; 17) Song for Kelly Huckaby (Facts Version); 18) Army Corps of Architects

Some early demos, and if you're listening to the now-canonical expanded edition, a bunch of surprisingly interesting early rarities to go with them.

Back in 1997 Death Cab for Cutie was just Ben Gibbard recording scruffy demos onto a cassette, developing his voice as a songwriter in humble conditions. You Can Play These Songs with Chords was a limited issue release of one such set of demos and it became wildly more popular than Gibbard had anticipated in more ways than one. In the real world of the late 1990s, its success inspired Gibbard to ask his friends to start a band with him so he could play those songs live, properly setting the good ship Death Cab in motion. From a wider influence perspective, whilst Death Cab in general have done a great deal to shape the post-2000s indie rock sound I would argue that the root of that legacy begins here already - at least if we go by how many demo-stage Bandcamp and Soundcloud (or Myspace...) artists I've heard over the years who've seemingly treated this EP and Something About Airplanes as instruction manuals.

But before we get too ahead of ourselves, lest we forget these are a selection of early demos at the end of the day and that's what they should be considered as, as well. Most of the songs on You Can Play These Songs with Chords would also end up on Something About Airplanes and as by and far identical versions beyond the minor improvements in recording quality on the album (and on that note, the sound on this isn't too bad, in case the "demo" moniker has made anyone concerned - it's just comfortably lo-fi). The deviations tend to be more coincidental than anything, like the brief tempo drops on "President of What?" which in no way sound intentional. If you're a fan of the material on Something About Airplanes (which I'd wager anyone who listens to this has heard already, unless you're really hardcore about chronological listening), it's the same songs; and on that same note, you can understand why this tape did create a minor excited buzz. Out of the three songs unique to this EP, "Two Cars" and "Hindsight" are more of the same forlorn mid-tempo indie melancholy that was the central pillar of this era of Death Cab, but the songs simply aren't as good as the others and it's obvious why they were dropped in favour of other material for the debut album (neat keyboard part on "Two Cars" though). "That's Incentive", on the other hand, positively comes out of nowhere with its blinding energy and power. It's almost punk-like and you could practically call it a precursor to the more muscular strain of emo rock that deviated from the rest of the midwest indie scene over the course of the 2000s. Death Cab have never sounded as intensively energetic as they do on "That's Incentive" - they've been plenty energetic, sure, but not with this kind of aggressive kick to it - and it's almost like a what-could-have-been glimpse of an alternative evolutionary path for the band. Plus it's just a great damn song, punching in at only around two minutes but leaving the biggest impression out of anything on the EP. Where did this Death Cab go when Gibbard actually got a band together?

But let's face it, though the first eight songs are a nice thing to have for the big fans, the real reason why this disc should be on anyone's radar is the ten bonus tracks that were included when the EP (album?) was reissued in 2002. Given Death Cab's growing popularity Barsuk set out to reissue the original demos which had previously been only available on cassette, but charging full price for a bunch of scruffy recordings (most of which most could already be found as improved versions on the readily available debut album), they expanded the tracklist and turned this into a haphazard rarities compilation for the first couple of years of the band's activity: the ten additional songs in the now-canonical version are limited issue singles and b-sides as well as a number of previously unreleased songs. Some are just plain and simple curios: the most notable thing about the cover of "This Charming Man" is Gibbard accidentally defaulting to a very awkward Mancunian accent when trying to sing Morrissey's melodies (and he flubs the lyrics too for good measure) and the early recording of "Song for Kelly Huckaby" has a slightly different vibe but otherwise isn't a patch on the version found on The Forbidden Love EP. But then there's the genuinely exciting, hitherto hidden material like the sugar-sweet, painfully twee lo-fi synth pop of "Tomorrow" that's far better than it probably ought to be and "Army Corps of Architects" which is a gorgeous, wistfully scene-setting piece that's genuinely among the highlights of the entire early years period, or the Weezer-esque "TV Trays" and the cheery power pop of "New Candles" (with Chris Walla in his one and only lead vocal appearance in the Death Cab catalogue) which both have a perky momentum that feels even more refreshing if you're listening to these immediately after the relatively placid main album. If you're into the first two Death Cab albums then the stretch of "State Street Residential", "Wait" and "Prove My Hypotheses" offer a selection of outtakes that could have just as well landed on the albums too - the Secret Stars cover "Wait" in particular grows from an initially quaint if seemingly unremarkable start to a really beautiful conclusion that marks it as one of the collection's highlights. And how could I not mention the befuddling "Flustered/Hey Tomcat!" is a casual, ad hoc foray into plunderphonics-like sampling that was practically to be born to be buried deep in the archives, but is the kind of novelty that every rarities compilation should have at least one of and it's got more legs to it than the self-snarking liner notes allow.

Together You Can Play These Songs with Chords and the ten bonus tracks form a vivid snapshot of a young songwriter learning his trade and then adapting it as the vision expands into a full band. The whole set is arranged chronologically so you actually get to hear the growth from the cosy early recordings to Gibbard and Walla first experimenting with the band's form and throwing ideas on the wall while simply having fun, to taking the experience from those sideways tracts and using it to build a bolder vision of their music with Harmer and Good coming in one-by-one. It all averages into a fairly good listen and a strong companion piece to the first two proper albums. It's scattershot by nature but you would expect that to some degree anyway, given what this is; but it holds up a lot better than maybe expected, as well.

Physically: Clear jewel case. The photo on the cover is actually printed on its own separate sheet on translucent film - you only get the solid, defined backdrop of the sky if the sheet is placed against the blank white front of the additional fold-out "booklet", which in turn contains the credits and selected band members' comments on the ten bonus tracks.

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