>>PREVIEW
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
Wednesday, April 26
The Corral (Stampede Park)
While Death Cab for Cutie fans have existed in Calgary since their earliest releases began making their way to our record stores and campus radio station from Bellingham eight years ago, there’s a line in their tender ballad "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" that has permanently endeared the band to our city.
A song so good that it makes the hairs on your arms stand upright, it has also become a fan favourite since appearing on last year’s Grammy-nominated Plans. In the third verse, lead vocalist and guitarist Benjamin Gibbard croons, "You and me, we’ve seen everything to see from Bangkok to Calgary."
"You know, I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t come out of a sentence and need for a rhyme, but clearly there are other cities that have a hard ‘e’ at the end of them," laughs Gibbard, the author of the lyric, halfway conceding that there’s special significance to Calgary making it into a Death Cab song.
"Juxtaposing those cities, at least for me – and I could be totally going too far with this analogy, but I’ll do it just for shits and giggles – it seemed to me like the possibility of travelling to both of those cities, like there’s no immediate or obvious connection between those two places. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why somebody would see everything between those two cities, know what I’m saying?"
Sure, except if you are a wildly successful band touring the world, like Death Cab for Cutie. Although the quartet hasn’t ventured to Bangkok yet – and Gibbard is betting his house that they probably won’t get there – they’ve been racking up fans all over the place. Between Gibbard’s successful side projects (such as The Postal Service, the band that remixed a track on Feist’s new album) and incessant Death Cab name dropping on The O.C., a massive amount of attention has been justifiably directed at their lovely songs.
Since beginning in the late ’90s in Bellingham, Washington, the garage rock capital of the U.S. and home of Estrus Records, Death Cab for Cutie veered away from the crowd and quickly became a favourite among indie rockers. They released their albums on the popular Seattle imprint Barsuk before making their major label debut on Atlantic with Plans. Notably, Plans clearly shows that Death Cab isn’t making any compromises with the commercial world. The album sold nearly 90,000 copies its first week.
They’ve just released their second DVD, Directions, a compilation of short films that marry up with each track on Plans. Each treatment was created by young, up-and-coming directors - perhaps the future Anton Corbijns and Michel Gondrys, offers Gibbard. The project was the idea of bassist Nicholas Harmer and video director Aaron Stewart-Ahn. Each video treatment, which does not include band appearances, was released one week at a time on Death Cab’s website.
The band has taken full advantage of creatively connecting with their fans via the Internet, including leaking a playful bootleg of "Talking Like Turnstiles" live at Portland’s Crystal Ballroom. The concert footage was shot on a not-so steady cam by a fan screaming to hear the song. Upon hearing the opening notes of his request, the fan abruptly goes ballistic and jumps his way to the front of the stage, offering the apology "this is my song, this is my song!" Audience members are genuinely disgruntled. The footage continues with the man hopping on the stage before running backstage and then… well, you can see the rest of the video on Directions. Gibbard laughs that it was a staged shot orchestrated by Lance Bangs, one of the cameramen on Jackass (the movie and TV show). The audience reaction was authentic – as was the Internet audience’s reaction - before the band let them in on the joke.
As anyone can see from the "bootlegs" and Death Cab’s first DVD, Drive Well, Sleep Carefully – On the Road with Death Cab for Cutie, the band unabashedly rocks out during live performances. Fan reactions like Bangs’s aren’t uncommon (except for the jumping onstage bit). Still, "I’ll Follow You Into the Dark" became one of the favourite encores on their tour last fall.
"All the guys (were) sitting around a table backstage and they were like, ‘hey we were thinking that it’d be a really cool idea if instead of ‘Calgary’ every night, you changed the city to whatever city we were in.’ They let it hang for two seconds and then totally started laughing. It was like, ‘oh my God, that’s the cheesiest thing ever. No way.’" |
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