No one made prettier postmillennial indie rock than Bellingham, WA, foursome Death Cab for Cutie. Smarter and more sensitive than almost any of his studiously introspective peers, singer/songwriter/guitarist Benjamin Gibbard formed the band—with bassist Nicholas Harmer, guitarist-organist Christopher Walla, and, eventually, crack drummer Michael Schorr—after the tape of his solo cassette EP, You Can Play These Songs With Chords, suggested there was a market for charming little photocopies of Built to Spill’s quieter, reverb-warped tunes. (Barsuk’s 2002 reissue bundles these with later, equally charming alternate takes and rarities.) On Something About Airplanes, DCFC took a baby step toward what would become its defining sound, smoothing over Built to Spill’s jittery bombast with Gibbard’s salve of a voice (previously a squeak) and slow builds. The five rerecorded cuts from You Can Play These Songs With Chords, subtly streamlined, showcase the band’s new emphasis on delicacy over dissonance. The critical breakthrough We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes applied the same principle, plus a smattering of psychedelia, to a new batch of songs with better melodies. But the best of that album’s tracks, “Company Calls Epilogue” and “405,” are fully realized as simple strummers on The Forbidden Love E.P., which came out later that year.
While sometimes nostalgic, as its brilliant name suggests, The Photo Album showcases Gibbard’s most scathing, not to mention most beautiful, songs to date. The urgent yet dreamy “Why You’d Want to Live Here” joins rock’s long tradition of ripping into L.A.—“You can’t swim in a town this shallow/You will most assuredly drown tomorrow”—and barrels into a break that’s smoggy with fuzz and shot through with sunbursts of chiming guitar. In “Styrofoam Plates,” gorgeously gentle but for its broken, unrelenting beat, Gibbard addresses his “bastard” father as he spreads the man’s ashes, the weariness in his voice giving way to anger: “You’re a disgrace to the concept of family/The priest won’t divulge that fact in his homily/And I’ll stand up and scream if the mourning remain quiet/You can deck out a lie in a suit but I won’t buy it.” And how does he end the song? “La la la la la-la/la la la la la-la.”
Transatlanticism is whipped cream to The Photo Album’s curdled milk, smooth but rarely stunning. Gibbard plants a land mine in the gently rippling guitar reverb of “Tiny Vessels,” recounting, for once, a one-sided romance in which “she was beautiful/but didn’t mean a thing to me.” Tracks like this and “Title and Registration” show the band at its best, pushing lovely melodies with borderline-restive rhythms. But elsewhere, particularly the almost eight-minute-long title track, the band’s slack with melancholy—perhaps a little too full of themselves.
Source: Rolling Stone megazine.
