Death Cab For Cutie

So this is the new year

And i don’t feel any different

It feels strange to listen once again to the opening words sung by Benjamin Gibbard on the fourth Death Cab For Cutie album, and it's natural to wonder whether, beyond the thousand implicit meanings in those lines (and the context they're set in), it's really just healthy, sensible superstition – the kind you resort to when you realize you've reached the threshold of a crucial moment and try to downplay it for fear of watching your hopes shatter. It's hard, in fact, to picture his life at a standstill on the eve of that 2003 which would forever change his artistic destiny not with one but with two albums released practically at the same time: chronologically first is "Give Up", the debut of The Postal Service project, released in February on Sub Pop; the other is of course "Transatlanticism", which arrives in autumn on the other Seattle label, Barsuk. Each, in its own way and to a different degree, points to new possible directions for an indie scene already starting to look only to the past. The question, though, remains: was Gibbard really – entirely or even just partly – unaware of the potential of the material he had in hand, material about to become the musical manifesto of an entire generation and the state of the art of the decade's indie rock?

Oh, instincts are misleading

You shouldn't think what you're feeling

At the time, Death Cab For Cutie were already a fairly well-established name in their scene, with a growing and thoroughly devoted following. They'd just come off three solid albums, and with "The Photo Album" in particular, released only the previous year, they'd shown they had shaped a mature, fully focused style. The only step left to reach formal perfection was "Transatlanticism", the place where ideas, accumulated experience, and an expressiveness demanding more room to breathe all click perfectly into place. At that point Gibbard was a machine churning out sketch after sketch ready to become songs, while simultaneously sharpening his skills as a writer – almost in the literal sense of the word. He found the ideal foil in guitarist Chris Walla, by then completely at ease not only as composer and performer but also as producer (his studio work would be in high demand from then on), and the chemistry in the studio was reinforced by the arrival of drummer Jason McGerr, joining Nicholas Harmer in the rhythm section. It's from these premises that the idea was born for a kind of concept album revolving around the broad themes of romantic relationships, the doubts inherent in growing up and existence itself, and distances – spatial and temporal – impossible to bridge: in other words, absence.

The distance is quite simply much too far for me to row

It seems farther than ever before

This is the sense in which the word "Transatlanticism" should be understood, a neologism coined by Gibbard to describe the distance – spatial, temporal, emotional – between two people in love, or who have stopped loving each other, or whose feelings aren't even reciprocated. Pain and redemption, bitterness and nostalgia, prickly passions: no one had ever talked about it quite this way, and no one had dug this deep, at least not for a long while. Gibbard's songwriting works through concise lyrics, relies on metaphor, and leans toward the universal, because ultimately it speaks of experiences and feelings everyone goes through sooner or later. It offers no comfort, nor does it propose solutions or ways out. It's simply the bare, unsparing account of the mechanisms that govern – or dismantle – human relationships, with particular attention to youth and romantic love (things you have to infer, since they're almost never explicitly stated).

The musical counterpoint follows its lead and its mood swings, but it's anything but mere backdrop. Electric surges shape the most agitated moments, while restless ballads cradle thoughts and memories through vivid images sketched with just a few essential strokes. It all plays out on an expressive urgency that occasionally borders on emo territory, but without ever giving in to the easy path of overt emotionalism: everything floats in a lukewarm purgatory where there's no difference between reality, imagination and memory.

It's no coincidence that the album would soon be plundered by TV series and film soundtracks – all of which unmistakably helped turn it into the quintessential post-adolescent record – starting with The O.C., where Seth Cohen's character crowns Death Cab For Cutie his favorite band ("A Lack Of Color" even makes it onto the official soundtrack).

Our youth is fleeting

Old age is just around the bend

And i can’t wait to go grey

The great generational manifesto is thus painted in bold lights, in emotional ups and downs that lead to opposite outcomes. There are the electric explosions of "The New Year" and of an "Expo '86" that bursts into one of the decade's finest choruses, the dazzling exuberance of "The Sound Of Settling", the pent-up tension of "Title And Registration" ("and all I find/ are souvenirs from better times", a ruthless distillation of the very idea of nostalgia) only partly released in the pocket-sized emo-rock manifesto "We Looked Like Giants" and in the fragmented flow of a "Death Of An Interior Decorator" that turns into a twilit carousel. And there are, above all, the moments that drown in a precise lyricism that never condescends. "Lightness" tiptoes along, seeking – and finding – an enviable formal balance. The underlying bitterness of "Tiny Vessels" ("this is the moment that you know/ That you told her that you loved her but you don't") again detonates in a chorus that stands as the desperate emblem of a love now over.

So come on, come on

The title track moves in the opposite direction, the conceptual and emotional epicenter of the record, with piano and guitars staging a crescendo of heartbreaking beauty as Gibbard repeats like a mantra "I need you so much closer", using the ocean as a symbol of an unfathomable vastness separating bodies and souls. The endpoint of an entire scene, of a generation in search of something to hold on to, materializes in almost eight minutes of unreachable lyricism.

And it truly feels like you've lived it, the journey told in "Passenger Seat": two young people, a car racing through the night, a sense of freedom and happiness that everyone, sooner or later, can admit to having felt. A piano, Gibbard's voice aching once again in the alien territory of the past, crossing paths on that backward journey with a Kerouac-like imagery. And if the gorgeous "A Lack Of Color" shifts its guitar arpeggios into the present tense, it does so for exactly the same reason: it's the return to reality, to life as it actually is, to the perpetual cycle of illusion reborn ("this is fact not fiction/ for the first time in years"). It's the circle closing once again – but maybe not for the last time.

Sometimes I think this cycle never ends

We slide from top to bottom and we turn and climb again

Ride the wave of great music

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22/04/2018