Death Cab for Cutie
The Photo Album
[Barsuk; 2001]
Rating: 7.1
I've always enjoyed looking at photo albums. Whether I know the people in them
or not is pretty irrelevant. There's something about the medium of photography
that just strikes me. Maybe it's just the possibility of stumbling across an
accidental work of art-- that one shot where all the visual elements are balanced
perfectly and someone exposes perhaps more of their personality than they
intended. People can't really hide from a camera; it catches everything, be it
a touch of nervousness in the smiles of a newlywed couple or the momentary pain
of exertion on an athlete's face.
It seems as though Ben Gibbard, on his latest outing with Death Cab for Cutie,
the band's third album in just three years, has attempted to capture in his
lyrics the verbal equivalent of amateur photography. That's not to say there's
anything amateur about the poetry in his lyrics-- quite the contrary, in fact--
but he captures those same little secondary emotions of the moment that cameras
capture so well. Add to this the fact that every song here contains at least
one vividly rendered image in its lyrics, and The Photo Album, rotten pun
aside, seems a fairly appropriate title.
The album opens quietly with the brief, sleepy "Steadier Footing," a glimpse at
a relationship that seems fated not to be. The organs, loosely strummed guitar
and softly struck floor toms conjure a dead-on after-party atmosphere-- quiet,
empty, a little smoky. From there, the band heads into "A Movie Script Ending,"
which feels the most like a logical extension of their work on last year's We
Have the Facts and Are Voting Yes of any song here. The spacious drumming,
intertwining guitar arpeggios and Gibbard's impassioned tenor pour forth a thick
syrup of melody in the verses and chorus, before an unfortunately awkward bridge
disrupts the flow of the song.
Such moments haunt the remainder of the album, as well, though they're generally
not too distracting. "We Laugh Indoors" suffers a bit from too-long instrumental
passages centering on wandering, loosely connected guitar phrases, but drummer
Michael Schorr keeps things moving with his insistent backbeat, and the band
finds their way before long. Still, form-wise, the song is oddly constructed
and fairly easy to tune out. "Information Travels Faster" kicks off with one of
Gibbard's best opening lines. "I intentionally wrote it out to be an illegible
mess/ You wanted me to write you letters, but I'd rather lose your address," he
sings, as the band provides a steady backing for him and his atmospheric piano
playing.
The most gripping song
musically, though, is also one of the most lyrically puzzling songs Gibbard has
ever penned. I'm curious if Gibbard simply had an especially bad experience in
Los Angeles or something, because "Why You'd Want to Live Here" is intensely
bitter. Lines like, "I can't see why you'd want to live here," "It's a lovely
summer's day and I can almost see a skyline through a thickening shroud of egos/
Is this the city of angels or demons," and, "You can't swim in a town this
shallow," make me wonder if he even tried to find something he liked about the
city before he wrote the song. But while the unrelentingly negative lyrics may
be hard to digest, the music certainly isn't. It's like swallowing arsenic with
candy-- the sweet melody and passionate delivery cause the song to jump out of
the pack as one of the few actually capable of lodging in your brain.
Similarly malicious is "Styrofoam Plates," though the vitriol expressed toward
the narrator's departed father is a little more understandable when you consider
the full story laid out in the song's lyrics. "It's no stretch to say you were
not quite a father/ But a donor of seeds/ To a poor single mother/ Who would
raise us alone/ We never saw the money/ That went down your throat through the
hole in your belly," is a spiteful mouthful to be sure, and it seems quite
plausible that Gibbard is writing autobiographically, though I won't purport to
know his family history.
One thing you may have noticed by now is that Gibbard has a tendency to sing in
full, grammatically correct sentences. This marks him as a unique lyricist to
be sure, but the downside is that it sometimes forces him to jam a bunch of
syllables that don't flow very well into a melodic phrase. This makes for more
than a few moments where you wonder if he wouldn't be better off resorting to
a more succinct form.
Thankfully, though, he has enough facility with his style
that it doesn't hurt the music too much-- witness the pop excellence of "I Was a
Kaleidoscope," a song that serves as a good reminder of why Death Cab were
relentlessly compared to Built to Spill in the early stages of their career.
Chris Walla's guitar hook shares the foreground nicely with Gibbard, who offers
lines like, "My teeth chattered rhythms/ They were grouped in twos and threes/
Like a Morse code message from me to me." John Vanderslice and Sean Nelson
offer backing vocals to fill out the sound.
The Photo Album comes to a curious close as "Debate Exposes Doubt"
collapses into quiet but dissonant piano and guitar figures, eventually petering
out completely. Overall, it reads like a look through some stranger's photo
album-- there are a lot incredible images contained within it, but there are
also a few embarrassing shots and the occasional moment in time that isn't
framed quite right. Still, the good outweighs the bad by a fair shot and it's
more than enough to wonder what kind of images the band has yet to treat us to.
-Joe Tangari, November 15th, 2001