Death Cab For Cutie Brixton Academy, London 7/7/11
3/5
By: Matt Tomiak
In some ways, it’s impossible for me to write about Death Cab For Cutie in an objective fashion. Within the Washington State quartet’s back catalogue are certain moments that reflect certain personal experiences in so prescient a fashion it’s pretty unnerving.
The band emerged from the Pacific Northwest’s indie scene almost 15 years ago, with vocalist and chief songwriter Ben Gibbard establishing himself as a lyricist of humility, perceptiveness, warmth and wit over the course of seven albums.
‘Brixton!’ he greets an appreciative audience this evening. ‘How the ‘F’ are you?!’ He's probably doing quite well. Since their breakthrough in the late 90s, Death Cab have departed their Seattle-based indie label stable for the majors, provided offerings for the soundtrack to the Twilight movie series and Gibbard has even acquired a Hollywood actress for a wife.
The core components of the wistful, melodic Death Cab for Cutie model haven’t changed throughout the years though, but one of the more intriguing aspects of latter-day performances is the juxtaposition of early material (lo-fi, ruminative, designed to be played to far smaller audiences than the thousands present in SW9 tonight) with the sleek, orchestral output of recent times.
Tonight, ‘We Laugh Indoors’ is submerged beneath the wail of FX pedals; the title track to this
year’s experimental 'Codes and Keys’ album swells to dizzying Arcade Fire altitudes. The band’s loyal followers (mostly plaid-shirt wearing, bespectacled and self-consciously pensive twenty-and thirty-somethings) aren’t likely to desert them any time soon, but neither do they seem to be accruing any new fans at a tremendous rate - indeed, Death Cab have been Brixton-sized ever since the release of
‘Plans’, their 2005 major-label mainstream breakthrough.
Their sets over recent years have been formed around comfortingly predictable moments – Gibbard’s solo renditions of the maudlin ‘I Will Follow You Into The Dark’, the show’s culmination with the epic yearn of ‘Transatlanticism.’ One of the older tracks performed tonight is ‘A Movie Script Ending’, a much-loved elegy to the strangely reassuring nature of hometown inertia. ‘The people remain the same, with prices inflating’ Gibbard sings of a return to Bellingham, WA: but he could just as easily be describing a DCFC gig in 2011.
Artists in this article: Death Cab For Cutie
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