Review: Death Cab for Cutie remembers Austin in 1999 at sold-out ACL Live
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"The New Year" by Death Cab for Cutie opens with instantly recognizable patty-cake-of-the-gods guitar chords:
BWOHM BWOHM
(A beat.)
BWHOHM BWOHM
And then, the lyrics feel the full force of hormones and the not-so-new-anymore millennium.
Ben Gibbard and company played "The New Year" early in their set Friday at ACL Live, the second of two sold-out shows in Austin. The opening track off of the Seattle band’s career-making 2003 album, “Transatlanticism,“ it is a signature Death Cab number, a song to which your mind would free-associate if prompted with the words “greatest hits.” Once the poster boys for indie youth culture, Death Cab has become something muscular and mature in the 2020s. Still, their best lyrics existed before therapy was as routine as your annual teeth cleaning. At the merch table Friday, the band sold shirts that read, “SAD MUSIC.”
Decades on, the band still channels the ineffable, while the passage of time is very, very effable.
When they transitioned into “The New Year,” the artists sank into a swimming pool of clattering, post-rocky sound, glowing under prismatic light gels that made a Willy Wonka tunnel into your memories. (The first of a few times.) As the title telegraphs, the song concerns itself with beginnings, endings and the door hinge that makes passage between them possible. Gibbard sang of “explosions off in the distance,” which is a great way to describe something, anything, that you felt deeply in 2003.
“I wish the world was flat like the old days,” he sang. “Then I could travel just by folding a map.”
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For me, someone who admittedly likes to wallow a little, I thought fondly of my own explosions off in the distance, sad as they were. With decades removed, though, songs like “The New Year” are just as joyful now as they are sad. An evening with Death Cab reveals that the two sensations have, just maybe, become a bit more comfortable coexisting. The years have created a little more map to fold.
That's all a little florid, I know. (I did grow up listening to Ben Gibbard songs.) A person deep in their cup said it more plain, exclaiming from the mezzanine at the beginning of Death Cab’s encore: “Play that emo s___! Let’s go!” The band immediately started playing “Brothers on a Hotel Bed,” about two people who grow so old they lose all their passion.
Gibbard reminded the audience at one point that it’s been seven years since Death Cab played their own show in Austin. (They did just play the second weekend of Austin City Limits Music Festival in October.) We could cut it down to five, he offered, since two of those years have been a pandemic wash.
“We’ve been coming to Austin for 24 years,” Gibbard later said. He told the story of the band’s first visit, to play at the old downtown Emo’s in August 1999. Ever a Pacific Northwest boy, Gibbard walked around town in a sweatshirt in triple-digit heat. He got heatstroke; they didn’t end up playing the show.
The band members were staying with some local musician friends in an apartment with not near enough rooms for the number of people, and they let Gibbard have a bedroom all to himself to recover. He remembered being taken aback by the kindness he found in Austin.
“That’s what this community has always been about,” he said. Death Cab then played “Rand McNally,” a song about “being a band in the late 1900s,” with lyrics like, “We lived on whiskey and Twizzlers, and youth's discontent.” The refrain: “I won’t let the light fade.”
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When conjuring past versions of yourself through ancient spells (aka songs you heard on “The O.C.”), it helps to cant your perception toward the surreal. Death Cab understands this. The opening bars of “I Don’t Know How I Survive,” the first track on last year’s “Asphalt Meadows,” found Gibbard in a column of white light surrounded by ink.
“Black Sun,” an apocalyptic single from 2015’s “Kintsugi,” was a solar flare, sonically. To lead the eyes where the ears were already going, the stage was blown out in purples and greens befitting a mushroom trip, or the Hulk. And perhaps to help a latter-day single pack a little more punch, the band went literal for “Northern Lights,” a radio-friendly pop-rock piece off of 2018’s “Thank You for Today.” The colors of the aurora borealis flashed behind the band on panels before escaping and washing everything rainbow.
During “Roman Candles,” a close-shorn Gibbard shook his head around like he still had those mid-2000s bangs. Been there. Death Cab cycled through a setlist of classics: The melancholic wedding march of “Cath…,” the full, predatory piano intro to “I Will Possess Your Heart,” the gray-skied thirst of “We Looked Like Giants,” the hippy-dippy twinkle of “Soul Meets Body.”
But the big hit, uh, hit different. A packed ACL Live shrieked in painful, euphoric recognition as soon as the opening strums of “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” started up.
Gibbard took the stage alone and gave the kind of history lesson befitting an “MTV Unplugged” sesh. The band came up during the second wave of emo, he explained as if passing down generational lore. So, they got pegged as an emo band. “We didn’t like that, but we had to deal with it,” he said good-naturedly.
Back in those days, they didn’t like to do the thing where they turned the microphone to the crowd and let them sing the song. Times, as we have well established, change.
“I’m much more secure in who I am and who we are,” Gibbard said.
And like proof that maybe cults are onto something — a Zilker Park’s worth of people singing the words to “Dancing On My Own” in 2019 as Robyn looked on, gushing, also comes to mind — a sold-out venue professed its eternal devotion to their neighbors, to Death Cab, to themselves, to their beer, maybe. I saw two ladies standing in the upper decks, bodies T-shaped and swiveling from their seats, eyes shut tight.
In stereo: “If heaven and hell decide that they both are satisfied/ Illuminate the 'no's on their vacancy signs/ If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks/ Then I'll follow you into the dark.”
Not to brag, but a man in front of me turned around and told me I have wonderful pipes. I would, indeed, follow him into the dark.
The final song of the night, of course, was “Transatlanticism,” the title track of an album so massive that it has spawned its own 20th-anniversary tour this year (paired with a two-decade tribute to “Give Up,” the similarly seminal album from Gibbard’s side project, The Postal Service). “I need you so much closer,” that song’s lyrics chant. An easy bow to tie on a night about coaxing the far-gone and the silvery into a room so frustratingly now.
So, in the interest of variety, “A Movie Script Ending” from 2001’s “The Photo Album,” might have left Austin with the neatest takeaway from a night of time travel and blissfully sad music. Gibbard sang clearly and kindly: “Passing through unconscious states/ When I awoke, I was on/ The onset of a later stage/ The headlights are beacons on/ The highway, highway.” And then, as the fans know, you sing the word “highway” 30 times, with maximum wistfulness.
Play that emo s___. Let’s go.
Death Cab for Cutie setlist on Feb. 10 at ACL Live
"I Don't Know How I Survive"
"Roman Candles"
"The New Year"
"Cath..."
"A Movie Script Ending"
"Here to Forever"
"Black Sun"
"Northern Lights"
"I Miss Strangers"
"Crooked Teeth"
"Rand McNally"
"I Will Follow You Into the Dark"
"I Will Possess Your Heart"
"Your Heart Is an Empty Room"
"Asphalt Meadows"
"The Ghosts of Beverly Drive"
"We Looked Like Giants"
"Soul Meets Body"
"Foxglove Through the Clearcut"
Encore: "Brothers on a Hotel Bed"
"Pepper"
"Marching Bands of Manhattan"
"Transatlanticism"
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Death Cab for Cutie and Ben Gibbard play sold-out ACL Live in Austin
