It’s a fairly unsual occurrence for this reviewer to arrive at a live music performance with next to no knowledge of the artist in question. And most of what I already know about the enduring Washington State five-piece is a result of their circumstantial overlapping with other aspects of popular culture; there’s a Beatles link in that the group are named after a song that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band perform during a scene in Magical Mystery Tour; I’ve been seething with an abstract hatred toward frontman Ben Gibbard who was married to peak 2010s Zooey Deschanel; and their best known tune, 2006’s double-platinum ‘I Will Follow You into the Dark’, provided a rare salubrious moment in Ricky Gervais’ mawkish dog’s dinner Afterlife.
The fact that a thirtysomething couple donning Bowling For Soup and Jimmy Eat World T-shirts can be spotted directly ahead doesn’t bode particularly well in the minutes before Death Cab For Cutie appear on stage. However, the muscular musicality of opener ‘Riptides’ – howling guitar octaves, interplanetary synths and staccato bass – reveal a veteran band instantly clicking into gear. ‘Roman Candles’, from 2022’s Asphalt Meadows, conjures an appealingly eerie combo of cooing backing vocals and more shrieking octaves from guitarist Dave Depper.
Scattered within an abundant 24 song set, spanning eight of the band’s albums, are a handful that induce instant audience cheers at their outset. The first of these is ‘The New Year’, the crashing guitar chords of its intro meeting with an enthusiastic response prior to Gibbard’s artfully aloof sentiments: “I have no resolutions/Or self-assigned penance/For problems with easy solutions.” Another of these tunes, ‘Black Sun’, features a muted, bouncy riff atop a bed of choral keyboards, and the refrain “How could something so fair be so cruel” is driven home by an acapella crowd singalong.
However, the setlist leans quite heavily into new material, with the appearance of seven songs from last June’s I Built You a Tower. Happily, therein lay a reassuring level of songwriting and indeed a couple of set highlights: The album’s title track has a languidly oscillating riff that is rather hypnotic and later ‘Pep Talk’ – in a similar vein with its appealingly airy guitar figure – contains an enjoyably catchy chorus facilitated by Gibbard’s falsetto skills.
Gibbard, once a cherubic bespectacled indie nerd, now presents as a lythe, bequiffed 50 year old, this manifesting in his confident striding about the stage and the perpetually swaying of his guitar. And, in his few prolonged interactions with the crowd, he seems about as affable as someone who was once in blissful matrimony with Deschanel can manage to be; he’s bristles positively about his time in Bristol, devouring “some of the hottest jerk chicken” and offers a glowing review of St Nicholas Market’s Wanted Records. He later jokes that bubble tea and pastries must constitute 70% of the local economy.
The only time where the band take an obvious misstep is the false start at the intro to ‘Rand McNally’; Gibbard’s clean arpeggios go AWOL before he sarcastically laments “I’ll try that again with the tuner off.” The song’s lyric “I won’t let the light fade”, interestingly, is in stark thematic antithesis to the song that follows. His bandmates briefly departed, Gibbard stands alone beneath the spotlights to deliver ‘I Will Follow You into Dark.’ His pick-strum acoustic guitar sounds wonderfully crisp and it’s a lovely crowd singalong which, rather than heartily boisterous, reveals a softly sung reverence usefully reserved for a hymn or vigil.
After a lengthy electro headfuck of brooding synthesisers and grumbling bass, ‘I Will Possess Your Heart’ feels a perfect sonic capturing of stalker-like menace and its lyrical themes of romantic obsession. The chorus refrain of “You gotta spend some time, love/You gotta spend some time with me” becomes an earworm by the song’s end, as if the tune – akin to the its fervent narrator – is imploring you to love it. ‘Crooked Teeth’ is jaunty indie-disco with an attractive chorus, and there’s more evidence of Depper’s characteristic soloing: he seems to rarely to deviate from a single string and often shreds with propulsing octaves at the lower end of the fretboard.
Now knowing more about Death Cab For Cutie, they have gone up in my estimation. Even if I need to still work on accepting the reality at least one of Gibbard’s former marriages.
Scott Hammond
