Death Cab For Cutie: Live at the Crocodile 4/23/99

Review by Dave Liljengren

At this performance, first in a series of regional showcases for bands on Elsinor Records, Bellingham's Death Cab For Cutie came into their own as a bona fide rock headliner.

After spending the past year riding the wave of a powerful "next big thing" whispering campaign and appearing in supporting slots in Seattle for popular locals like Nevada Bachelors and Harvey Danger (whose lead singer, Sean Nelson, has been an exuberant Death Cab supporter from the beginning) DC took the stage Friday as the obvious crowd favorite. The alchemy which resulted will not soon be forgotten.

Your dutiful correspondent was not as dutiful as he might have been. Missing the first two bands entirely, I arrived in time for Puritain. Hampered by unfamiliarity with borrowed equipment-- the band had returned in haste, sans guitars and amplifiers, from LA to play the set of shows with Death Cab-- Puritain struggled to build momentum. Their sound, more algebraic than geometric, is decidedly minimalist. Sonic equations, sometimes created out of fetching slide guitar runs, are only partially delivered, leaving the audience to solve for X on their own and ponder what the band is driving at. While their performance Friday left too many variables unvalued for a satisfactory equation, the idea was interesting enough to warrant a further attempt at solution the next time the band is in town with their own equipment.

Death Cab followed. Their onstage manner is so unassuming, their lack of rocking ego so obvious that as they took the stage I felt as though I were in the presence of a high school band at the talent show. Any concern about their experience, however, was dispelled when the first chords jumped from vocalist Ben Gibbard's guitar.

With a set list made up almost entirely of the deftly-constructed and somber, yet inescapably heartening, nocturnal pop with which they filled their debut CD, Something About Airplanes, (Elsinor/Barsuk 1998) DC exhibited their trademark facility for hook development. DC plays highly melodic and easily remembered music. It's essentially pop music, but it's done with a subtlety and a feel for how to suggest deeper, darker things that few can match.

Gibbard delivered his apt, complex, and highly personalized, lyrics with the earnestness normally reserved for explaining death to a child. In the painstakingly-crafted, echo-rich, musical backdrop, guitars chimed and wavered an ominous presence while an obsidian-solid drum pattern moved the tunes forward.

Throughout the show, guitar sounds were constantly reinterpreted, broken down, and presented in new ways. The understated, at times elegant, keyboard work of multi-instrumentalist, Chris Walla, contributed effective mood-shaping in the early numbers.

More craft than art, more science than magic, creating pop music in the last days of the millenium is the contradictory labor of creative rehash done in the hope of building something spontaneous and fresh. At their recent Crocodile show, assembling familiar sounds but casting them into novel textures and delivering them with unassailable honesty, DCFC has shown they are well on their way to mastery of this difficult pursuit.