The Pageant, St. Louis, Missouri
4/4/06
So you’re in St. Louis on a Tuesday night and you don’t want to hang out in the Northwestern suburb hotel all evening. You look up what’s happening downtown and notice that one of your favorite bands at one time is playing live. Decisions, decisions. First of all, there’s a part of you that feels like you’ve outgrown Death Cab For Cutie; you can only take so many albums of sensitive meanderings and, frankly, you didn’t buy their last album “Plans” (their first major label release) because it wasn’t as good as the album before it, “Transatlanticism,” which was most awesome. Secondly, you saw “Drive Well, Sleep Carefully” and determined that not only were Death Cab For Cutie pretty boring fellows, but their live performances were not filled with any elements that would make you say “They were great live.” Thirdly, the venue is, like, 45 minutes from your hotel and why fight traffic to go see a band that isn’t known for memorable live performances. Fourthly, the show is sold out.
Fuck it, you drive in your car through some pretty unsavory neighborhoods with a back-up plan to grab a decent dinner and do some record shopping at a store you had good luck with before (read: a used copy of Alexander Spence’s “Oar”). You walk down to the venue and you’re greeted by a black man who offers you a salutation of “Tickets.” You buy them. And then you’re in line to go see Death Cab For Cutie.
Let me back up and vent a little bit about the current state of ticket pricing, thanks in large part to our friends at Ticketmaster. General admission tickets for this show were $25. Ticketmaster adds another $5 for their “convenience charge.” They add another $1 for a “venue” fee. They charge for postage. In total, if I actually bought these tickets through Ticketmaster, I would be looking at least $38 for them; I paid $30 for my ticket. We live in a time where I can actually buy a ticket to a sold out show from a scalper for less than what I could have gotten them legitimately.
The first thing I noticed about the show was the audience. Death Cab For Cutie is an alternative rock band for chicks. The crowd was made up of about 60% chicks, which made me feel like a pansy considering that I related so much to albums like “We Have The Facts And Are Voting Yes” and “Transatlanticism” and think the world of songs like “Movie Script Ending” and “Photo Booth.” These chicks apparently really liked “Plans” they sang every song from that album and had multiple orgasms when Ben came out during the first song of the encore by himself and sang “I Will Follow You Into The Dark”. They sang the words, called up their girlfriends and held their cell phones up in the air to provide them with a taste of the sensitive boy onstage with an acoustic guitar.
But I didn’t go out of my way to people watch at the DCFC show; I came here for the music. All told, they played plenty of my favorites and less of the ones I didn’t care about. What that means is they featured a lot of material from “Transatlanticism” and “The Photo Album,” and if you’re familiar with those albums, you’ll understand there was a lot of drama that DCFC had to sell on a Tuesday night. Here’s the thing: it dawned on me that those albums are now several years old and, I’d imagine, that some of the emotional connection behind them have been tapped clean. This is assuming that the subject matter of the songs are based on Ben’s own real life events. Can a person deliver first sexual awakenings (“We Looked Like Giants”), deadbeat Fathers (“Styrofoam Plates”) and finding old pictures of lost loves in glove compartments (“Title & Registration”)? That’s questionable. But it didn’t stop me from realizing what a kick-ass song it ultimately was.
The crowd was most responsive to the “Plans” material, in which case, it was strange that they didn’t perform more from it. Like I said before, it’s not my favorite album by them so I’m not complaining. But for the chicks who voice approval during the first drum beats of “Soul Meets Body,” I’m sure they would have liked to continue playing the role of Jenny Lewis a few more times than what the band offered.
Ben played his retarded electronic drum pads and the road crew brought out a little drum kit so that he could play it for, no shit, about a minute and a half at the end of “We Looked Like Giants. A little retarded, especially considering that the band has found real talent in their existing skin-pounder, Jason McGerr
Overall, the music was non-threatening, perfectly suited for non-threatening white chicks. The band was mixed in a very pedestrian fashion; guitar’s rarely got to a level of distortion and Gibbard’s voice was always high in the mix. Interplay was kept to a minimum, with the exception of the aforementioned “drum duo” during “Giants” and the obligatory extended ending of “Transatlanticism.” The rest of the material didn’t deviate too much from the album versions, aside from a couple of changes in vocal inflections here and there. Ben and guitarist Chris Walla demonstrated their “multi-instrumentalist” titles by frequenting the keyboards on most songs. That’s the problem for me: leave the keyboards for the occasional textural treatments and for Postal Service releases. For me, one of the intriguing thing about DCFC was the guitar interplay underneath Gibbard’s knack for writing good melancholy. Now I understand that Postal Service moved 500,000 units and that “guitar interplay” doesn’t always translate into commercial success, but it’s certainly a lot more interesting than replicating synth-filled tales of love lost. “Interesting” is subjective, of course, and judging from those in attendance, they were more interested in tales of love lost than how it was presented.
Setlist:
Marching Bands
New Year
Live Here
Title and Reg.
President
Crooked Teeth
Differen Names
Movie Script
Company Calls
Photobooth
Styrofoam Plates
What Sarah Said
Soul Meets Body
Expo '86
Giants
Settling
Encore:
I Will Follow You Into The Dark
Title Track
Transatlanticism
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