How do I describe the mixed emotions of waiting for a performance of a previously cancelled concert, especially when it’s by a band that I’ve never heard live? The “hope” that drives the process of delayed gratification is a dicier game when the gratification is an unknown. One not guaranteed by past performance. Anticipating a favorite chocolate, for example, is different than anticipating a “well-reviewed” chocolate. And therein lay the head game that wandered through the days leading to Death Cab for Cutie’s rescheduled Portland concert. Am I waiting to be disappointed? This reservation filtered my expectations, my shrugged “yeah, whatever” wait and see attitude as Luann, Cordana and I aimed the GPS to State Theater, Portland to see Death Cab for Cutie, time-shifted a couple months by illness and scheduling.
It is Dylanesque (and yet not) for a storyteller to slip the bonds of factual accuracy by introducing a story as a mere caper in the fields of “perhaps”, or “it is said” or “I have heard”. I felt I was under a good storyteller’s spell when Ben Gibbard kicked open the edges of the stage with an exasperated “I don’t know where to begin”, leading into No Room in Frame. Reality had already been served notice. A story was being told, the first lines a poured frustration. What followed?
An unanticipated blowout of a concert. To me, Gibbard’s aphoristic poetry enters an intensely personal, navel-gazingly interior, the voice of a quiet, shy man. The studio recordings tended to bear this out. The anger and frustration within lyric content smoothed by good production and tuneful editing. And the “mini-desk” concert on NPR was quietly acoustic, mellowing any severity into three instruments, bass, piano and voice. Even the “loud” songs had a musical beauty to them.
Imagine my glee…..Death Cab enters the stage fresh off a month-long hiatus….the rescheduled Portland concert now serving as the opener for a fall tour. Now it is more like Martin Luther at the gates, strident and angry. The stage seemed a cage to be kicked at, wandered through like a pacing lion. Gibbard went to the mic as necessary, but never became possessed by it. Instead, it was just one square yard of a much larger painting, and Gibbard was determined to use the whole canvas, move move move all the time. The first songs rolled out as one long song…. brilliantly blended, folding precisely into each other in such crisp specific form that one heard the discipline of the band. It couldn’t have been more accurately presented if they had used score sheets and music stands. Bang, splash, riff, chord change, drum fold and turn….new song… bang! Like Elvis Costello’s channeling of three minute 45’s from the 60’s into 80’s punk. A race…. how many songs can we play per minute? And, like Elvis Costello years ago at the State, the amps were cranked to 11. It was LOUD. They had figured how to respond to the State’s infamous echo problem. Push the sound out so hard that the echo never comes back….At times there were four guitars and a drum kit. Occasionally three guitars, a keyboard and drum kit…. LOUD…I finally got some sense of the physical shock that Dylan fans must have felt at Newport or the infamous British tour that followed. In this case, I was thrilled by the shift. No booing from this aisle seat at all.
The concert was billed as the Kintsugi tour, promoting the new album, and the set was heavy with Kintsugi works but also notably the critically successful earlier work, Plans. What struck me throughout the course of the concert was the breadth and tightness of Gibbard’s writing. His sense of the aphoristic phrase can atomize a paragraph into a couple carved lines and the whole meaning will remain. Telescoping the total collapse of a relationship with the simple phrase “no room in frame…for two” is just the easiest example. There are so many others. Also, I can’t say enough about the band. So tightly wound yet somehow loose and professional at the same time. There are only three musicians acknowledged as Death Cab for Cutie, Nick Harmer, Ben Gibbard, and Jason McGerr. However the group is touring with a couple guitar/keyboard aces, Zac Rae and Dave Depper, at this point still just hired hands. The band played as if they had known each other for years and seemed very comfortable and adept at the total catalog. Happily, in the course of the two-plus hours, Death Cab generously played plenty of the essential library covering decades of their work. They missed some songs I would have enjoyed live, “Summer Skin”, “Your Heart Is an Empty Room”, and disappointingly, nothing from Gibbard’s side projects such as Postal Service or the Kerouac Sessions. But they cheekily added a few songs, obscure, wonderful and difficult to find, from the depths of their back catalog, even Photo Booth from the EP Forbidden Love.
It should be noted that, like Jeff Tweedy at the same venue, acoustic works were a dicey call. Whenever Death Cab dropped into the quieter realm, the audience noise became very problematic. Certain songs were responded to reverently, “I’ll Follow You Into the Dark”….”What Sarah Said…” as best examples, sometimes but not always turning into evocative, touching sing-alongs with the audience. And others just became jumbled ambient noise. But on the whole, the audience was on good behavior, listening at least somewhat attentively, definitely MUCH better than the Tweedy concert.
Luann and I had excellent seats, balcony, fourth row, close to center. The view was unobstructed, the sound was powerful yet not overwhelming, a lot less echo and audience chatter than first floor. On the downside, there were way too many people “experiencing” the concert by recording it on whatever platform available….other than the DIY method of eye and ear. So, it was weird to watch the concert and then also see it on the recorder of the person one row closer, all jumpy, out of focus and invasive of the real. How does one not watch what is in front of them?
After following the group’s set lists since the fall tour started, I have noticed that the concerts begin and they end quite purposefully …..and, interestingly…..they end twice. The concerts always begin with the storyteller phrase “I don’t know where to begin”.and then winding through a tapestry of emotions, events, stories and adventures for the next two hours. In keeping with that Dylanesque slyness, the “official” pre-encore portion of the concert ends with Ben Gibbard trying to discover Kerouac’s spirit at Bixby Bridge and acknowledging
And 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
The concert then goes on with several songs shifting here and there, but always ending with “Transatlanticism”, a tale of people just slowly drifting apart, until Gibbard closes the concert, repeating the closing phrase….”I need you closer, closer….I need you closer”.
On the whole it was an excellent concert, especially if one assumes that they will not be following them on tour or likely ever see them again. It was a well arced concert that prismatically rainbowed much of what made Death Cab for Cutie a specific music that both held and shifted decades of my life.
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