It took six albums, three EPs, countless singles, four or five record labels, a much-loved side project, numerous guest productions, and a thoroughly boring solo LP to get to this point, but Death Cab for Cutie will end 2008 as a big-font festival band. And yet, though their sound has grown increasingly muscular, and their outdoor sets tend to only reach as far back as "We Laugh Indoors", they still seem ill-suited to wide-open spaces. As I watched two high-out-of-their mind, shirtless, thirtysomething acid casualties make out during Coachella while a rickety version of "Soul Meets Body" played in the distance, it just seemed to go against everything Death Cab has come to stand for. In other words, they still manage to carry themselves like a small band from a tiny Washington college town.
Upon re-release, the most striking aspects about Death Cab's debut, Something About Airplanes, were how modest it sounded and how removed it was from the Modest Mouse/Built to Spill template of the Pacific Northwest. If there was any resemblance to their regional forefathers, it was in their ability to create a sonic blueprint that's subtly innovative. Few were writing lyrics-- formed almost as complete sentences and melodically structured the same-- like Death Cab's Ben Gibbard at the time. The bridge of "President of What?" sounds like it's taking the wrong step with each chord turn, moving in an opposite direction to the melody, but the resolution makes complete sense: "Nothing hurts like nothing at all/ When imagination takes full control."
In a strikingly candid interview with Paste magazine, Gibbard admitted that he goes back to this record and rarely has any idea what he was talking about. While it's typical for a lyricist to embrace straightforwardness in his later years, recent tracks like "You Can Do Better Than Me" are no more rewarding for their directness. Something About Airplanes instead sounds like a private affair, which is one reason it's so treasured amongst diehards. Like so many other fledgling songwriters, Gibbard cloaked his voice in reverb and occasional distortion (even on the sweet and sour harmonies of "Pictures in an Exhibition") and danced around sentiment. For a band inextricably linked with heart-on-sleeve emoting, Death Cab could be delectably difficult to parse.
You can also hear how naturally and incrementally the group progressed from a fully formed blueprint. Regardless of Narrow Stairs' heavy-handed addition of new textures, you can trace a straight line to that point from the carefully considered guitar lattices of Airplanes' "Your Bruise". "Sleep Spent" is a direct descendent of mid-90s slowcore with better hooks. "Amputations", the most full-bodied track, features rumbling and almost mockingly chiming guitar hooks that sugarcoat the lyric "he's unresponsive 'cause you're irresponsible"-- a stronger precursor to their more recent theater sing-along lines like "you are beautiful, but you don't mean a thing to me."
While the deluxe package does include selections from their nervous first live show in Seattle and a cover of the Smiths' "Sweet and Tender Hooligan" featuring Harvey Danger's Sean Nelson, the real draw here is the chance to re-evaluate the band itself, often underrated or deemed as a group people "used to like" before getting into harder and more challenging music. And yet, while most of the indie crowd now embraces pop music in all its forms, something about dudes like Death Cab, who hit a little close to home but aren't considered "cool," is still considered a dealbreaker.
Certainly, Something About Airplanes isn't Death Cab's best album-- in retrospect, it sounds like a dry run for 2000's We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes, where the lyrics got more pointed, the hooks more emphatic, and the dirges more steely and purposeful. The studio tricks would become more sympathetic as well: In addition to the dated samples that adorn "President of What?", "Amputations" closes with a snippet of a motivational record called "You Can Better Your Best" that proclaims "if everybody's making fun of you or criticizing, you know you're on the right track." Granted, the song itself is about the futility of becoming someone you're not to win someone over, but the line unwittingly serves as a mission statement for a band that went Gold while rarely answering to anyone but itself.
