Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/deathcabforcutie
Death Cab and Tim Duncan.
Even casual sports fans are familiar with Tim Duncan. Four-time NBA champion. Two-time MVP. By any reasonable measure the greatest power forward in basketball history. Despite his historical greatness, he's been somewhat overshadowed during this era. During his career he's rarely been mentioned as the best player in basketball, despite winning as many championships as anyone (Shaq has tied him with four). Duncan's problem is that he's boring. He's so spectacularly un-flashy that his nickname is the Big Fundamental. In an era of emotional, demonstrative sports stars, Duncan is the man in the iron mask. He's never gotten suspended or arrested or choked his coach or gotten into a feud with his teammates. Good grief; the guy only has two tattoos! All he offers is season after season of relentless excellence and winning basketball.
Death Cab for Cutie is the Tim Duncan of indie rock. They don't do any one thing better than anybody else, but they're as reliable, dependable and trustworthy as any band in music. Ben Gibbard doesn't have the best voice, they don't play flaming guitar solos or riffs, and they don't turn their amps up to eleven. They even look nerdy. Moreover, their career has been remarkably consistent. It's nearly impossible to choose a best album or best song from their catalogue; they've produced a nonstop procession of quality music for a decade now and don't show any signs of slowing down.
Though it's not flashy or attention-grabbing, I appreciate and admire Death Cab's consistency. One of the disappointments that any audiophile has experienced repeatedly is getting to know a band and to come to love one of their albums only to be disappointed by the next release. This usually happens either because the band releases essentially the same album back to back, or, trying to avoid this, they release an album with an entirely different sound from their last album, with the main difference being that they've replaced a good sound with a different, sucky sound.
Not so Death Cab. They've managed to craft a distinctive sound so that you instantly know a Death Cab song when you hear it, yet each song is unique and memorable in its own right. They are that rarest of commodities: a trustworthy rock and roll band.
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You remember The Graduate? You know, Dustin Hoffman, Simon and Garfunkel, Ann Bancroft being sexy and creepy all at once? Anyway, in the iconic scene at the end of that movie, Dustin Hoffman's character Ben Braddock shows up at the wedding of the Ann Bancroft's daughter and screams, "Elaine, Elaine," and runs off with her to elope. "Cath . . ." is the song that Ben Braddock would have written if he had to watch Elaine go through with the wedding. Well, he would have written it if they were both a little older and Ben wasn't, you know, sleeping with Elaine's mom.
2 comments:
I like "Cath," but Narrow Stairs didn't really do it for me. I like their recent EP better.
I haven't checked out the new EP. I think Narrow Stairs was solid, but not their best work. I think my top Death Cab albums would be:
1. Photo Album
2. We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes
3. Plans
4. Transatlanticism
5. Narrow Stairs
I don't have Something About Airplanes or You Can Play These Songs with Chords, so I can't comment on those. Really, though, there's not a great deal of difference in the quality of 1 through 5, just Narrow Stairs didn't sink its hooks into me like the others.
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