It's tough not to
get emotional about a band like Death Cab for Cutie. For a lot of people my
age, these guys weren't just a band; they were the band. For every Seth Cohen wannabe between here and 2003, Death
Cab might as well have been The Beatles. Their songs gave an intimate nobility
to the science of heartbreak, provided a gleaming façade for the concept of
lonesome solitude, and built a world apart from everything that sucked about
being a teenager or young adult in the first decade of the new millennium.
Suffice to say that every person who ever laid in bed
feeling sorry for themselves to the sounds of "A Lack of Color" and
"Transatlanticism"—and you can bet that there are a lot of those
people out there—holds Death Cab for Cutie to an impossible standard. And how could they
not? Kids from my generation, they grew up with this band; they learned the hard
lessons with this band's music playing in the background; they made mixtapes
for their future husbands or wives featuring songs written by this band. Those
kinds of nostalgic, emotional connections don't go away after five years or 10
years or 20 years, and while they will immortalize Death Cab for Cutie forever, they will also guarantee that Ben Gibbard and company will forever deal with the problem of impossible fan expectations.
That fact became very evident on the band's 2011 effort,
Codes & Keys. Fan entitlement is a weird, off-putting thing in the best of
circumstances, but I don't think I've ever seen a fanbase backlash against a
band with quite the same level of noxious vitriol that got laid upon Death Cab
following the release of Codes & Keys. Essentially, fans blasted Gibbard
for getting married and writing a happy record, because it didn't mesh with
their memories of being depressed and lonely and listening to Transatlanticism
and We Have the Facts… in the dark. In some circles, Zooey Deschanel, Gibbard's
(ex-)wife, even got labeled as Death Cab's Yoko Ono. The critical and fan
consensus was that Gibbard was happy, so he wrote shitty songs. Fans in turn
wanted him to stop being happy, so that he would write good songs again.
Leaving aside the fact that Codes & Keys is hardly the
gleeful "we're married and in love" album that many made it out to
be, it is still fucking inexcusable that fans reacted to it in the way that
they did. It's one thing not to like an album; it's another to act like a band
owes you because you forged an emotional connection to their songs 10 years
ago; and it's quite another thing to suggest that a songwriter doesn't have the
right to be happy because it impairs his artistry. Let's be clear: the Death
Cab for Cutie fanbase is full of assholes.
Still, a lot of those assholes got their wish when Ben
Gibbard and Zooey Deschanel separated and subsequently divorced within the year
and a half that followed Codes & Keys. Ben Gibbard was heartbroken and
lonely again! Hooray, maybe he would write Transatlanticism part two! But
Gibbard's break-up album—which doubles as Death Cab for Cutie's eighth LP,
Kintsugi—has hardly been greeted as a return to form. Instead, now, Gibbard is
being lambasted for being too much of a sad sack sap, and for writing precisely
the kinds of songs that a lot of fans wanted
him to write three years ago. "A group resting on its laurels,"
PopMatters called the disc; "overwrought," said The Guardian;
"boy-next-door, paint-by-numbers indie pop," Pretty Much Amazing
wrote.
Such poor reviews illustrate the kind of no-win scenario
that bands of Death Cab's age and profile often face. The band took chances and
evolved their sound with Codes & Keys—as well as with 2008's Narrow
Stairs—and neither album got a warm reception. Kintsugi, meanwhile, is a return
to form—filled with the kind of aching melodies that populated Plans, and with the
scathing and mournful guitars that filled Transatlanctisicm—but it has resultingly
been called safe, bland, flat, predictable, a step backwards, a band spinning
its wheels, etc. Where does a band go when they can no longer do anything
right? What kind of songs do you write when fans want your heartbroken
boy-next-door honesty when it's missing, and then mock it when it returns? Which
direction do you take when your fanbase turns against you?
From listening to Kintsugi, it's pretty clear that Ben
Gibbard and the rest of Death Cab for Cutie (including departing guitarist and
producer Chris Walla) didn't worry much about pleasing their unappeasable fans here. Rather, they made a tuneful and honest record that perfectly captures
the feeling of breaking apart and putting yourself back together again. The
highlight is "No Room in Frame," the opening track and the song where
Gibbard most directly addresses his recent divorce. "Was I in your way,
when the cameras turned to face you?/No room in frame for two," he sings
on the brief chorus refrain. Later, he delivers the kind of devastating lyric
that many came to Death Cab for in the first place: "And I guess it's not
a failure we could help/And we'll both go on being lonely with someone
else." On first listen, I was immediately thinking, "this is the band people fell in love
with." When that line is followed by a wash of some of Walla's most
evocative electric guitar work, it just feels like home.
The rest of Kintsugi is every bit as lonesome. On
"Little Wanderer," Gibbard communicates with a lover through texts,
as she travels the world and leaves him home alone. The song is a beautiful
encapsulation of both love in the digital age and of long-distance
relationships. In the second verse, the narrator is "doing the math to the
time zone you're at," falling asleep just as the sun is rising for his
significant other on the opposite side of globe. And in the final passage, he
imagines the moment "when our eyes meet past security" and "we
embrace in the baggage claim." Anyone who has ever been in a long distance
relationship will relate to the urgency of this song, and to that moment in particular.
When you spend days, weeks, or months away from the person you love, you are
constantly counting down the moments until you are together again. You make
up these reunion scenarios in your head, envisioning them as sweepingly
romantic moments worthy of film.
If you're lucky, you get to experience those moments in real
life—the most powerful of which is the one where the distance finally
disappears for good. If you're unlucky, your machinations are never realized.
They remain stuck in your head, playing on loop in frenzied montage of the
things that could have been but will never be. For Gibbard, it's the latter: at the end of
"Little Wanderer," he's imagining a moment that will never happen.
Like City and Colour's "Hello, I'm in Delaware"—another great song
about long distance relationships—"Little Wanderer" is about a couple
whose bond won't survive the weeks they have to wait until they see one another
again. The problem here is one that technology and constant communication can't
fix, and that closing snapshot, with the imagined reunion in Gibbard's head, is
such an effective twist of the knife that the song becomes his most vivid heartbreaker since Plans.
Throughout its 11 tracks, Kintsugi wanders the dark back
roads of heartbreak, covering every stage of the end of a relationship. During
"Black Sun," Gibbard rages at Zooey. "How could something so
fair be so cruel?" he asks, before a ragged guitar solo from Walla gives
his anger a corporeal shape. On the white-knuckled "The Ghosts of Beverly
Drive," he rages at himself, repeatedly remarking, "I don't know why,
I don't know why/I return to the scenes of these crimes"—the song
careening around corners like a train about to go off the rails. And on
"Binary Sea," he finally finds acceptance and resignation, bidding his old
love farewell as the album drops its curtain.
Make no mistake, there is a lot of bitterness in these songs, from "Everything's a
Ceiling"—where Gibbard implies that Deschanel thought of herself as the
center of the universe—to "Ingenue," where he asks his young and
beautiful ex-wife what she will become "when age's glacial pace/Cuts
valleys into [her] face." But there's also contrition and self-loathing,
as Gibbard, who has often played the victim in his songs, recognizes that there
are two people to blame for the end of his marriage—and he's one of them. In
"El Dorado," he berates himself for letting jealousy prevent him from
being proud of his wife's accomplishments; on "You Have Haunted Me All My
Life," he wonders why he gave up on someone who was such an important
piece of his world for so long; even on the resentful "Ingenue," you
can hear a lingering fondness in Gibbard's voice as he advises his ex to
"escape from this town"—presumably Hollywood—"before [her] sand
runs out." It's his last plea, for her to live her life and be herself
instead of letting the pressures of stardom change her, and coming as it does
after the break-up, it feels poignant and heart-rending.
As Kintsugi draws to a close, Gibbard finally closes the book on his failed marriage. "Lean in close and lend an ear/There's something brilliant bound to happen here," he sings in the final bars of "Binary Sea." It's a hopeful ending to a record that rarely reflects optimism, but a sign that, with these songs, Gibbard has worked his way through his heartbreak and is ready to start the next chapter of his life. In that way, it recalls Coldplay's Ghost Stories, another downbeat breakup album from a massive band that was unfairly maligned upon its release. Regardless of critical thrashings or fanbase backlashes, though, these two records were the albums that their creators needed to make at the time. This kind of exorcism of personal demons is essential work for any artist, and as someone who believes necessity often begets the greatest art, it's work that I gravitate toward personally. Kintsugi might not be a departure from Death Cab's past style, and it might not appease all of the old fans. But to me, a band being this honest and open on record is far more interesting than a band trying to reinvent the wheel for the purpose of reinventing the wheel, or to reach a group of people who outgrew them five years ago.
