The records TRANSATLANTICISM by Death Cab for Cutie and GIVE UP by The Postal Service both turn 20 this year, so Ben Gibbard is taking both bands on the road to perform both albums front-to-back. This tour came to The Salt Shed in Chicago on Saturday night for a sold-out performance.
To be honest, these are records that I like but don’t love.
I was aware of Death Cab for Cutie in 2003 due to working at my college radio station, but at that point I was doing my own show and wasn’t terribly interested in the indie rock favored by the station. It wouldn’t be until after I graduated that I got into that sort of music. Death Cab was definitely one of those bands, but TRANSATLANTICISM wasn’t on my radar until well afterwards. Ditto for The Postal Service. It’s entirely possible that I didn’t check their sole album out until I heard one of their songs covered (!) in an M&Ms commercial (!!).
The crowd was about what you would expect – receding hairlines and love handles galore. Parents with their children (both young and teenaged). Gen Z was there too, because Spotify and such has made generational demarcations of music meaningless. There were some old dudes there too. I am not sure if they were super hip or thought they were going to a combination Magical Mystery Tour/U.S. Mail convention. Whatever the case, everyone was definitely there to see the show. Death Cab songs are notoriously quiet, but talking over the slow stuff was kept to a minimum.
The Death Cab portion of the show took place first. Now, I have no particular nostalgia for the album so I wasn’t tempted to text an ex-girlfriend. What was I supposed to do here, be wistful for all the sex I wasn’t having at the time? So, I didn’t have any intensely emotional responses to the songs. The irony of couples mostly, presumably in long-term relationships here to see a performance of 20-year-old songs about longing, lost love, and meaningless sex wasn’t lost on me.
Either I haven’t paid close attention to a DCfC show in a while, or Ben Gibbard was trying to channel a youthful energy from 20 years ago, because he was bounding about the stage during the entire set. Album opener “The New Year” absolutely cooked. The other rocking – and I mean that term relatively to other Death Cab songs – did what they were supposed to do: “The Sound of Settling” got the crowd involved with its “buh-BAH!” call-and-response refrain; “We Looked Like Giants” – TRANSATLANTICISM’s best song – was superb, even if it lacked the extended, jammy outro present on some live versions of the song.
For all the things that make Ben Gibbard seem bookish and beta – the wan vocals, his collegiate phrasing (“The glove compartment is inaccurately named / And everybody knows it / So I'm proposing a swift, orderly change” from “Title and Registration,” and also the name of the album they were here to celebrate), the man can be devastatingly mean when he wants to be. When he sang (multiple times) “You were beautiful, but you don’t mean a thing to me” on “Tiny Vessels,” all I could think was “the chutzpah on this guy!” Quite frankly I’ve never had the opportunity to say that to a woman, which is just as well because I wouldn’t have the confidence to say it anyways.
The emotional centerpiece of the night was the title track. The refrain of “I need you so much closer” was sung by both singer and crowd, over and over again, building like waves threatening to overcome the breakwater. It felt almost as if it represented the conversion of one’s exciting and terrifying twenties to a (hopefully) more stable and mundane thirties (or, yes, fine, for those of us who are elder millennials, forties).
The band seemed to sprint through the album, not because the songs were faster but because there was hardly any space between the songs. No banter or breaks. After closing track “A Lack of Color,” Ben Gibbard said “thank you, we’ll reset and be back in 15 minutes with the Postal Service,” and that was it.
The TRANSATLANTICISM set got plenty of applause, and it was certainly deserved. But the introspective indie rock was no match for the Technicolor electronics and guitar pop of The Postal Service.
From the opener “The District Sleeps Tonight” on, it was a combination dance party and Dashboard Confessional show, with the crowd both hanging onto and singing along to every word. Every song was met with raucous applause. “Such Great Heights” was an all-time arena rocker for just one night. Every time Jenny Lewis did… pretty much anything, the crowd roared its approval. And it was warranted: her duet with Ben Gibbard on “Nothing Better” was awesome; it was also the only text-your-ex temptation of the night. (It’s a break-up song where both people agree to say goodbye in the end. I think that means I’ve grown as a person or something.) She also added a menacing guitar solo to the end of a song that wasn’t there on record, which brought some rawk to the proceedings. (Like I said I like this album, not love it. I do not have the names of the songs memorized and I sadly did not write it down.)
Just as Ben Gibbard said a mean thing in a song a few paragraphs ago, I had a mean thought as this set was going on, and that is that I think the girls he was singing about over the course of TRANSATLANTICISM in a negative light are the same girls that were eating this songs up with a fork and spoon, only they don’t have the self-awareness to know it’s them. It was sort of like that Chris Rock bit (link EXTREMELY NSFW) about meeting a girl at a club to Lil’ Jon’s eternal crunk hit “Get Low.” If that sounds a little resentful and misogynistic, well, to quote Tammy Wynette, “I’m just a man.” But I didn’t begrudge them a good time; the intoxicating blend of Jimmy Tamborello’s glitchy, off-kilter beats and Gibbard’s sturdy songwriting was a winning combination and probably ahead of its time for 2003. If GIVE UP came out today I think it would be a #1 smash hit.
(To make up for the previous paragraph I will admit that I held my wife’s hand during “We Will Become Silhouettes”, because what is more romantic than a song about nuclear apocalypse?)
Album closer “Natural Anthem” was probably the most welcome surprise of the night. The beginning of the song was noisier and glitchier and more blissed out than the studio cut. It added some balance to the delectable pop of the past 40 minutes, while building and building to something terrifying and wonderful until it folded in on itself, a dying star imploding to an abrupt end. To say it was a metaphor for life is probably a stretch, but it felt like it meant something more than just being some noise.
Of course, that wasn’t the end. They came on for two more songs: an acoustic rendition of “Such Great Heights” (which proved what a great song it was, stripped down to just a guitar and the vocals of Ben Gibbard and Jenny Lewis) and a cover of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy The Silence,” for which the dance party started anew.
The Millennial Nostalgia Tour may not have hit me the same way it did for some of those in attendance. I didn’t wallow in a breakup to TRANSATLANTICISM and GIVE UP didn’t soundtrack makeout sessions in my parents’ basement or in a darkened dorm room. (In fact, most of my experiences with that album are as naptime music for my now five-year-old son.) But it was still good music performed with an unmistakable joy that was infectious. The fact that the songs mostly sounded like their studio counterparts didn’t hurt either. I won’t lie, it was kind of a costly trip for one night in Chicago, but I don’t regret it one bit. It was an excellent show.
If anything, both during the concert and while writing this, I thought an awful lot about the people I’ve been and the person I’ve become. If there’s a higher compliment you can pay a moderately successful indie rock LP and a one-off collaboration that was intended as a labor of love, I’d sure like to hear it.
