Artist: Death Cab For Cutie
Album: The Photo Album
I went to see Death Cab at the Tower Theater in Philly a few years ago. That trip was quite the adventure. The road that mapquest told us to take was under construction, and we didn’t know where we were going…and we ended up driving in circles in a rather less-than-good part of the city. After driving past the same cop two or three times, he threw on his lights and pulled me over. I’m betting he was thinking we were in one of two situations-lost, which we were, or looking for drugs, which we were not. Anyway, he told us which way to go to get back to where we needed to be, and after a lot more cursing and slamming of the steering wheel, I finally found the theater.
For whatever reason, we were allowed inside the building, but not to our seats, so we were milling around in the lobby. I remember signing up for the XPN mailing list and getting a button and a bumper sticker for doing so. I remember scoping out the merch and thinking that even for a high-brow tour like they were doing, it was too expensive. I did, though, at that show buy my DCFC tote bag which I still use all the time, because it is just about the most awesome tote bag I have ever owned.
While we were looking at the merch, though (and here comes the point of all of this rambling), “cousin Kevin” pointed out The Photo Album and remarked how awesome of a disk this was. I replied that I did not own it, and he was shocked by this revelation. I considered, at that moment and for the rest of the show, going back to the merch table to pick it up, but decided that the cash I had left in my wallet would better be spent on gas and Wawa munchies on the way home from the show.
At some point after that, but still a while back, I decided that it was my mission in life to acquire every DCFC album that had been released to that point. I am thinking that this happened about the time that Plans was released, but there were still quite a few albums previous to Plans that I didn’t have, The Photo Album still, of course, being one.
I was unsuccessful on completing that mission, but I did, during that time, acquire The Photo Album. Hang me by my toenails and stone me in town square for being a hipster snob, but I love old DCFC so much more than the new stuff. Ben Gibbard just DOES sadness. I cant explain it any other way. If he was put on this earth to make music, the stuff he was making early on is the stuff he should have stuck with.
Songs like “blacking out the friction” and “Styrofoam plates” are two that have been staples in my collection since the day I bought this album. I spent some time researching “Styrofoam plates” because it HAD to be something that happened to him, the emotion was just too raw, so imagine my surprise when I found in an interview that he did not write that song based on his own experiences.
If death cab wrote more lyrics like the ones on this album, and fewer songs like “meet me on the equinox,” they would probably still have a hardcore fan in me. As it stands, though, I could take them or leave them.
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