In a world in which there are perhaps too few pleases and thank yous, the new album by Death Cab For Cutie bears a welcome title, Thank You For Today. William Dart is gratified by both sentiment and music.
Photo: Death Cab for Cutie ex artist website
It’s hard to believe that the American band, Death Cab For Cutie, has chalked up a 21-year career that has seen them achieve the status of grand middle-aged men of indie rock.
They’re not quite “alternative” by my old radical standards, but you do need to chase up their ten albums in the alternative bin at your local record shop. Although you’ll be very lucky to find their debut, the 1998 Something about Aeroplanes.
'Champagne from a Paper Cup' from that album is a good example of how Ben Gibbard pulls his songs together.
There’s a certain slacker air to it, right from its opening reverb guitar and deliberated boom of drum. Gibbard’s vocals somehow keep aloft over it all and, when the harmony intensifies, there are moments where he works against Nick Hamer’s bass lines like a tightly penned hymn tune or chorale, culminating in the final thrust of “on and on, on and on.”
By 2003, and the band’s fourth album, Transatlanticism, Gibbard had finessed his song-writing to the point that a track like 'Passenger Seat' was as much art song as rock song.
Perhaps this impression was coloured by the fact that the album is organized around a single concept — 11 songs that have been likened to a dreamscape, exploring themes of loneliness, heartache and long-distance love.
Within just a few years Gibbard would write a song that received an accolade some of his colleagues may still dream of.
'Soul Meets Body' from Death Cab’s 2005 album Plans was selected by soprano Renée Fleming for her adventurous if only fitfully successful crossover venture of 2010, Dark Hope.
Maybe it’s ironic too that the Metropolitan Opera’s favourite diva peps up the tempo a little, with her four man band making a few nods in the direction of Philip Glass.
Ben Gibbard is not only a master of gentle remonstrating; he can bare his teeth with the best of them.
And he did just that two years ago when Dave Eggers asked him to contribute to his 30 Days, 30 Songs project. Death Cab for Cutie was one of a number of participants who gave Donald Trump a musical thumbs-down, on a daily basis, in the month leading up to the November 2016 American election.
While Aimee Mann took to The Don’s Obama envy in a wistful but delicately barbed lullaby, Gibbard looked at the issue of where the Trump fortune came from.
His song, titled 'Million Dollar Loan', queries the origins and ethics of legendary wealth. And, in the Simian Design video, you can see as well as hear it, as Gibbard’s lines unfurl against a Donald Trump look-alike.
In our modern world, in which there are far too few pleases and thank-yous, the new album by Death Cab For Cutie bears a welcome title: Thank You for Today.
In fact it’s a quite specific "thank you" for Gibbard’s home town of Seattle. In a recent interview, he reflected on the comfort of being almost 42, sitting in a house that he owned, enjoying a good living through playing music. And he owes much of this to the culture and legacy of the Washington State city that nurtured the band.
Thank You For Today is a collection of ten reflections, couched in elegant Gibbard song, the first of which rises from a familiar dream state.
The song 'Gold Rush' is very much about Seattle and the state that houses it. Gibbard has described it as a “requiem for a skyline”.
Much of the old has gone, of course, trampled by modern so-called progress and you can check his critiquing of our cellphone mania at the end of the song’s video.
But who could imagine that the gritty subsoil of the song was transplanted from what’s perhaps the undisputed Queen of the avant-garde, Yoko Ono. The year is 1972, the album Fly, and the song: the 17-minute 'Mindtrain'.
Gibbard takes Shank’s pony in Alex Southam’s video for 'Gold Rush', walking and singing along his hometown streets — although ironically it’s shot in LA rather than Seattle.
The song is a wake-up to where our world is heading, expressed with the sort of narrative that Phil Ochs might have turned in his time.
Director Southam has Gibbard walk past forties glamour girls, hippies, basketball jocks. He gets the occasional jostle, but they’re nothing like the cell-phone jungle in which he finds himself imprisoned. An image to be savoured during a long and inexorable fade.
Listen to these songs and several more by clicking the "Listen" button up above.
Music Details
'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)
'Death Cab for Cutie' (Stanshall) – The Bonzo Dog Band
Cornology Vol 1 – The Intro
(EMI)
'Champagne in a Paper Cup' (Gibbard) – Death Cab For Cutie
Something About Airplanes
(Barsuk)
'Passenger Seat (demo)' (Gibbard) – Death Cab For Cutie
Transatlanticism
(Barsuk)
'Passenger Seat' (Gibbard) – Death Cab For Cutie
Transatlanticism
(Barsuk)
'Soul Meets Body' (Gibbard) – Renee Fleming
Dark Hope
(Mercury)
'Hold No Guns' (Gibbard) – Death Cab For Cutie
Kintsugi
(Atlantic)
'Million Dollar Loan' (Gibbard) – Death Cab For Cutie
30 Days, 30 Songs
(Atlantic)
'I Dreamt We Spoke Again' (Gibbard) – Death Cab For Cutie
Thank You For Today
(Atlantic)
'When We Drive' (Gibbard) – Death Cab For Cutie
Thank You For Today
(Atlantic)
'Mindtrain' (Ono) – Yoko Ono
Fly
(Apple)
'Gold Rush' (Gibbard, Ono et al) – Death Cab For Cutie
Thank You For Today
(Atlantic)
