A Week With Death Cab For Cutie's "Narrow Stairs: Day 5
20 August 2008
tell your friends...
Words by Tony Conte // Illustration by Erica Parrot
5 days with this album will only wet the palette.
Within the raucous depth of its first song, Narrow Stairs boldly announces its intentions.
“Bixby Canyon Bridge” introduces first the reverb of a tensly picked guitar string, then Gibbard grounds us firmly in the literal as he walks us down a dusty gravel ridge where some unspoken loss had taken place.
Gently arpeggiated guitars and slight percussion bow to the abrupt, distortion-heavy force of a single chord caught in a cycle of sharp downstrokes. The drums can’t take it any longer, and drive forward hot and heavy, thrashing irregularly. The ensuing chaos of unorchestrated noise throbs in existential turmoil. A thick blanket of feedback falls over all of the individual instruments leaving only a jarring twinge of electric.
The song follows a man arriving at a place where an ambiguous traumatic event had previously befallen a loved one, and so Gibbard sings in his most pure, un-effected voice.
As the man waits patiently for an epiphany to occur, or at least some connection (beyond the landscape) with his lost loved one, Gibbard angrily gives us his bullhorned voice which has fallen a step back from the mic. And when the man concedes that no amount of self-doubt will help him connect again, Gibbard is now quite a distance from the microphone, his voice lavishly echoed as if at the end of a long metal tunnel.
“Then it started getting dark. I trudged back to where the car was parked. No closer to any kind of truth. As I must assume was the case with you.”
And with “Bixby Canyon Bridge”, Death Cab For Cutie kicks off its most ferociously tight collection of songs in years with all of the echo and unearthly squall of a true rock band rediscovering the joys of noise and melody.
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“Bixby Canyon Bridge” is actually a sort of open letter to Jack Kerouac. Ben Gibbard wrote this song about his time in or around the cabin where Kerouac stayed (Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin, I believe) trying to conquer his (at that point) desperate alcoholism, which he wrote about it Big Sur. It’s a great song regardless, but as an enormous fan of Kerouac and Death Cab, the subtle specifics of Gibbard’s lyrics make it all the more striking a song.