Death Cab For Cutie - The Photo Album : The Perfect Picture

Death Cab For Cutie - The Photo Album (2001)

A while back I wrote an entry about bands, I wish I liked more than I do. The entry was to show how much I did appreciate their talent and respective places in music history. Unfortunately, is caused the drummer of one of the bands to curse me out on Twitter. I didn’t know whether to be upset or complimented that they took my opinion so personally. It felt kind of like when John Travolta's Rolling Stone writer character in “Perfect”, ran into Carly Simon who pissed about a story he wrote in the magazine about her, tosses her drink in his face.

 

Anyway, there are a few bands out there that I also only really like one album. I’m not saying there aren't other songs the group has done off other albums I enjoy. Just when it comes to complete albums, only one really holds my ears' attention.

 

Some band’s albums which may fit this category:

 The Flaming Lips 1990 In A Priest Driven Ambulance the Suicide Machine’s 2000 Self-Titled, where they dropped most the horns”,

Another one that particularly sticks out because I listen to it so much would be Death Cab For Cutie’s 2001 The Photo Album.

In their first album Something About Airplanes the band still has a very Built To Spill influence on their sounds. Ben Gibbard’s voice even resembles Doug Martsch’s voice. The songs even have a few Built To Spill-ish signature time changes. “Fake Frowns” is a very good song but if I heard it without knowing was performing the song, I would have assumed it was Built To Spill. The band’s guitarist Chris Walla’s production also does not help the album. The music and lyrics sound jumbled together with the drums sounding particularly harsh. Again, I understand this is the band’s first album, so this is understandable.

 

The second album 2000’s We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Against the band has really worked out its sound. The album does have a couple good songs in “405” and “Company Calls”, but the production, again by Chris Walla, still has the music and vocals a little too muddy for my tastes. Looking back, it’s a little bit of a shame since once the Doug Martsch similarities were gone singer Ben Gibbard would soon have one of the best and most discernable voices in rock music, first really noticed in “Employment Pages” at track 2. At least the drums are less harsh.

 

At this point I almost gave up on the band. But I am glad I didn’t. In the fall of 2001, I moved the New York City, soon finding a record store just a few blocks from my job. The store, where I bought and traded so many CDs for the next 19 years, was called Academy Records. The first CD I bought from them was Death Cab For Cutie’s The Photo Album.

 Almost right away you can hear a big improvement on the band’s sound. Again Chris Walla is at the controls, but he must have been practicing. On the album opener “Steadier Footing” you can hear singer Ben Gibbard’s voice perfectly along with the guitar. This quiet and slow song serves as a great introduction to the album. It’s almost as if the protagonist is settling in before going to sleep and dreaming the rest of the album. Some of the lyrics like “It's gotten late and now I want to be alone; all of our friends were here; they all have gone home” help create this imagery. Or perhaps the person is first waking up to take on the day like some lyrics in later songs on the album may prove.

“A Movie Script Ending” and “We Laugh Indoors” at Track Two and Three are more great examples of the much better production. You can hear the drum, bass, guitars, and of course, Gibbard’s now all his own sounding vocals perfectly. As a matter of fact, over the course of the whole album, the vocals and instruments are perfectly balanced. I recommend listening with a good pair of headphones to receive the full effect.

Track 5 “Why Would You Want To Live Here”  about Los Angeles is one of the biggest highlights of the album. The song explains all the things like “freeways creeping”, smog which may cause trouble breathing, “thickening shrouds of egos”, or star maps which are “never current”. The perfect speed-up, and distorted bridge where a now stressed-out Gibbard sings “The vessel keeps pumping us through this entropic place,

In the belly of the beast that is Californ-I-A, I drank from a faucet

and kept my receipts for when they weigh me on the way out, here nothing is free. but the greyhounds keep coming, dumping locusts on the street. Til the gutters overflow and Los Angeles Thinks” also made me realize I made the right choice in moving to New York rather than “The City of Angels or Demons”. Especially since it probably would have been the Greyhound that got me out there. This is definitely my favorite song on the album, maybe in my Top-50 songs of All-Time and it always amazes me it wasn’t a single.

"Blacking Out The Friction", the single "I Was A Kaleidoscope", and "Styrofoam Plates" follow before we come to another song that may fall into that Top-50 at well. 

"Coney Island" at Track 9 is sheer perfection. Only two minutes long its music and lyrics totally relay the history of the past greatness of the attractions and the joy which they would bring in the upcoming summer. All while sitting and admiring the calmness of the offseason. The song has a similar feel to "Ghostown" by The Specials, but unlike that song, this one is positive since the attractions would be opening up again in a few months. This song, as well as Joseph Heller's "Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here" which I had just read, made me eager to go to Coney Island in the upcoming summer. At this point, I had only seen it from the Belt Parkway while driving back and forth from school. 

Over the course of the next 17 or so years, Death Cab For Cutie would release another seven albums. All, of course, are very good. There are many songs on them like "New Years" of 2003's Transatanticsm, "I Will Follow You Into The Dark" of 2005's Plans, or "I Will Possess Your Heart" and "No Sunlight" off 2008's Narrows which I love and will listen too over repeatedly and put on a mix for years to come. When it comes to a whole album from start to finish, The Photo Album will stand alone. 

To end on a positive note in an effort not to have a member of the band curse me out on social media, Ben Gibbard's 2003 Postal Service "project" or anything he does solo will always be in my heavy rotation. I highly recommend checking out his cover of the whole Teenage Fanclub Bandwagonesque album, including a song focused on in this blog just a few entries ago. 

Here is an Unofficial "Coney Island" video with classic Coney Island scenes: