A Week With Death Cab For Cutie's "Narrow Stairs": Day 1
24 June 2008
tell your friends...
Words by Tony Conte // Illustration by Erica Parrott
Crawl into a tight space just wide enough for you to stretch your arms without touching your fingers to the wall. Your mouth is dry and eyes wide in the dark. You’ve no room to rise up on your tip-toes, and no space to sit on the floor.
Death Cab For Cutie’s Narrow Stairs feels much like this: desperate and cramped. Full of deep breaths punctuated by the pain of broken ribs.
First thing you’ll notice here is that DCFC’s sophomore effort on Atlantic has given the boys an opportunity to dress down their sound. If Plans was an afternoon at a wake in their Sunday-best, then Narrow Stairs is stumbling into the funeral hungover still wearing Friday’s jeans and a t-shirt stained with bar-food.
Plans was a debut, of sorts, for Death Cab. Remember, they’d taken the leap from their longtime indie label (Barsuk) to the majors (Atlantic) at a time when the tide had turned in favor of the indies. As a band, Death Cab really had to prove its mettle in the studio so as not to become a “sell-out” to the elitist contingent of its long-time fans, while still reaching out to a broader audience. Also keep in mind that Ben Gibbard’s side project, The Postal Service, built a solid base of new fans which helped Transatlanticism gain a foothold in the then-fickle world of independent music. It’s no surprise then, taking all of this into account, that following Plans’ relative commercial success DCFC would stretch its sound beyond the cleaned up, subdued melancholy of much of its recent music.
The first single off of Narrow Stairs is an ode to unrequited love as seen through the eyes of a stalker. A solid bassline strings together the first wordless minutes of the song while disparate sounds swell from the inside like cotton from the edges of a ragdoll. Four and a half minutes is more than enough time to let a song get away from you, but DCFC has become a master of building tension without boring you to death. (“Transatlanticism” drones on for a good seven minutes and yet somehow I still sit through it, rapt, every time I listen as if I expect the song to take some new, alarming turn.) During those first few minutes, the reverb rises up, the drums hiccup like a bird’s twittering heart, and the band establishes a groove backed with the momentum of ragtag melodies and a flange of guitars while building their most accomplished textural piece yet. A maddeningly simple and devastatingly catchy melody trickles from the piano. When Gibbard finally speaks up, he already sounds rattled with emotion, and the music nearly drops away entirely to his courageous and forceful vocals.
“How I wish you could see the potential of you and me. It’s like a book, elegantly bound, but in a language that you can’t read just yet.”
It’s an odd love song, full of omen and threat, and it’s a surprisingly unlikely choice to represent the album on commercial radio (sprawling over eight minutes). As raw as they’ve been since their ’97 demos, Death Cab still manage to use every minute economically. And just like “Styrofoam Cups” off of The Photo Album, with its raging interlude of chaotic guitars, the song couldn’t be shorter now even if it wanted to.
Death Cab For Cutie Official Site
“Styrofoam Cups”? Come on, at least know what you’re talking about please.
Thanks for your note, and apologies for the misprint. The song is actually called “Styrofoam Plates”.
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this is a brilliant idea, progressive reviewing, really beautifully written. Lovely image of a ragdoll bursting at the seams.