Tag: Death Cab for Cutie

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Music Music Blog

Beale Street Music Festival 2017: A Perfect Saturday

I can understand why some people don’t like to go to large, outdoor music festivals. They can be hot and dusty as the Sahara, or as rainy and muddy as the Western Front. Like any situation with a huge crowd, you can run into annoying people. And worst of all for music fans, the sound can be hit or miss: Either it’s so muddy you can’t hear the performances, or there’s so much bass bleed from the giant EDM party on the next stage, the band you came to hear gets drown out.

But Saturday at Beale Street Music Festival 2017 was an example of everything that can go right with an outdoor music festival. First and foremost, the weather couldn’t have been more perfect. The temperature topped out at 79 degrees, with brilliant sun only occasionally eclipsed by puffy clouds. Humidity was non-existent, and the steady breeze off the river drove away mosquitos and kept everybody cool. The sound was perfect, the acts were high quality, and the crowd, while enormous, was mellow and happy. Even the mud from last week’s rains had mostly dried by the time the first bands took the stage after 2 PM.

Amy LaVere at BSMF 2017

Memphian Amy LaVere was the first up on the FedEx stage at the southernmost end of Tom Lee Park. Backed by her husband Will Sexton and ace Memphis guitar slinger David Cousar, she won over the gathering crowd with an atmospheric take on her song ‘Killing Him”.

I watched about half of Amy’s near flawless set before hoofing it all the way to the other end of the park to catch another one of Memphis’ great live acts, Dead Soldiers (whom I interviewed for this week’s Memphis Flyer cover story). By the time I got to the River Stage, the band was going full throttle through songs from their new album The Great Emptiness. At one point, singer Michael Jasud realized he had a wireless mic and decided to take advantage of it. He leapt into the crowd and sang a couple of verses surrounded by the cheering audience. After returning to the stage for the climax of the song, the winded singer said “I just want y’all to know the level athleticism it takes to do that. It’s a level I do not possess.”

The Dead Soldiers’ Michael Jasud sings in the crowd during BSMF ’17.

A couple of songs later, drummer Paul Gilliam grabbed a tambourine and made his own crowd excursion.

Dead Soldiers drummer Paul Gilliam leads the BSMF crowd in a sing a long.

After the set, I ran into trombonist Victor Sawyer. The Dead Soldiers set was the third one he had played at Beale Street Music Festival, twice with the Soldiers and once with Victor Wainwright and the Wild Roots. “It’s always incredible!” he said. “It so cool to see a big crowd out there, with old faces and lots of new faces.”

Victor Sawyer (left) and Nashon Bedford play with Dead Soldiers at BSMF ’17.

I spent the rest of the day crisscrossing Tom Lee Park, trying to catch as many acts as I could. KONGOS from South Africa battled high winds as they meandered through a jammy cover of The Beatles’ “Get Back”, with singer Daniel Kongos pausing in the middle to deliver a rap. The crowd, which by mid-afternoon had swelled into the tens of thousands, went nuts for their ubiquitous hit “Come With Me Now”.

The Beale Street Music Festival lineups favor music performed by actual humans, but festival EDM was well represented by GriZ on the Bud Light stage. The Michigan producer had a major dance party going with his beats, to which he occasionally added saxophone solos. MUTEMATH was next, and judging by the ecstatic reception they got, the death of alt rock has been greatly exaggerated.

I always try to drop by the Blues Shack, and his year I caught Terry “Harmonica” Bean keeping a couple  hundred festival goers entranced with his strong Hill Country blues groove, tapped out with a strong booted foot. For Memphians, this kind of thing can seem old hat, but for at least some of the people gathered in front of the Blues Shack, Bean’s performance was a revelation.

Terry ‘Harmonica’ Bean at the Blues Tent.

Speaking of revelations, the Drive-By Truckers‘ sunset set proved to the best performance of a day filled with strong musicianship. It started off a little rough, and a few minutes late, but once the Athenians built up some momentum, they were incredible. As the sun went down, singer Mike Cooley commented on the beauty of the backdrop. This is the first year the I-55 bridge has been lit up during Memphis in May, and combined with the spectacular sunset, it made for a beautiful tableau against which the band played a muscular, searing set. In a heartfelt monologue recalling his own youthful days of partying, Cooley dedicated a song to Jordan Edwards, an African American teenager who was shot in April by Texas police as he left a party.

The view from the Memphis Flyer tent as the Drive-By Truckers’s sunset performance.

The big draw of the River Stage was the one-two punch of hip hop superstars. Dressed in black with his dreadlocks tied behind, the Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz played with his DJ E Sudd to an adoring, overflow audience, introducing songs from his upcoming album Pretty Girls Like Trap Music, and tearing the proverbial roof off with a triumphant reading of his hit “I”m Different”. I watched about half of the set before wandering over the the River Stage to catch some of Death Cab For Cutie, who were playing in front of an equally large, if somewhat more subdued, crowd. Death Cab made their reputation with small, intricately structured rock songs, but at Tom Lee Park, they traded their twee for a stadium pounding rendition of “The New Year” that was all feedback smears and power chords. Singer Ben Gibbard looked like he was having the time of his life.

When I returned to the River Stage, Wiz Khalifa was holding court with a blunt in one hand and a microphone in the other. I only was able to get within about a quarter mile of the stage area, which was packed to the gills with dancing humanity. By this time, the audience had swelled to a size that was as big as I’ve ever seen at BSMF. Maybe it was the idyllic weather, or maybe it was the clouds of pot smoke rising from Khalifa’s adoring fans, but everyone seemed very chill, happy, and friendly. In times past, it has not been unusual for me to see a fight or two over the course of the weekend. One memorable BSMF in the 1990s, I saw a full on brawl by the porta potties that resulted in overturned outhouses and a couple of very unhappy festival goers covered in blue sewage. This year, there was not even a hint of that. A couple of times, people bumped into me and actually apologized! As confetti rained down on the Wiz Khalifa crowd, I found myself thinking that this Memphis In May Saturday shows what’s great about Memphis, and what a great music festival can be.

Confetti rains on Wiz Khalifa.

Will Sexton plays with Amy LaVere at BSMF 2017.

David Cousar backs Amy LaVere at BSMF 2017

Michael Jasud, Paul Gilliam, and Krista Wroten Combest of Dead Soldiers.

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Music Music Blog

Beale Street Music Fest Announces 2017 Lineup

Kings of Leon

The Beale Street Music Festival has announced its lineup for 2017. Headliners include Snoop Dogg, Soundgarden, Widespread Panic, Wiz Khalifa, MGMT, Kings of Leon, Sturgill Simpson, and Death Cab for Cutie.

For a complete list of performers and times, check out the BSMF lineup page.

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Music Record Reviews

Alt-rock success story bounces back.

Formed in 1997 and official major-label recording artists in 2003, Death Cab for Cutie has experienced general rising success that, for a majority of American bands, must seem as attainable as cheap gas and a van that doesn’t break down.

Death Cab leader Ben Gibbard is no rock star — doesn’t look like or act like it. But as Death Cab has gotten more popular, Gibbard has made a decided attempt to write anthems that are at least as big as the stage he and his pals now find themselves on. Despite that, Plans, the band’s previous album and the major-label debut, felt stubbornly inert and practically vanished on contact.

Narrow Stairs is a different matter altogether: It sports guitars that actually squeal and drums that are pounded in a manner more appropriate for stadiums than coffeehouses. It also has a few songs that are absolute winners.

The album opens with “Bixby Canyon Bridge,” Gibbard’s ode to Jack Kerouac and his lesser-known novel Big Sur. (Gibbard spent two weeks writing in the same cabin where Kerouac penned Big Sur.) Though “Bixby Canyon Bridge” practically explodes with noise about midway through, Gibbard’s relationship to the famous beat writer isn’t spelled out enough for the song to take flight. But the melancholy atmosphere that pervades the rest of the album is successfully set.

The eight-minute-and-change “I Will Possess Your Heart” is the tale of a stalker that works much better when cut in half for a radio edit. But just when you think Narrow Stairs is going to settle for decent-not-great, “Cath…” hits like a bolt, pairing Gibbard’s sharpest lyrics with an infectious burst of musical energy. The portrait of an uneasy bride (“She holds a smile/Like someone would hold/A crying child”) is pitch-perfect. Too bad that “Cath…” is followed by the squishy nonsense of “Talking Bird.” “Your New Twin Sized Bed” isn’t as electric as “Cath…,” but it’s a well-observed number with an infectious hook.

Death Cab for Cutie seems to be warming to its new role, and Narrow Stairs certainly offers more bite than Plans. Rock stars rarely get to show off late maturity, but Gibbard has bucked a lot of trends, and he might be ready to buck one more.

— Werner Trieschmann

Grade: B+

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Music Music Features

First The OC, Then the World

Fifteen years after Seattle launched the alt-rock revolution, the Pacific Northwest remains the locus for non-mainstream music, exerting a powerful grip on the pop-cultural imagination.

One of the musical and commercial mainstays of this scene is Death Cab for Cutie, a foursome from Bellingham, Washington, who’ve made four well-received albums for Seattle-based Barsuk Records as well as a lauded major-label debut last year. This might be the most well-connected group around: guitarist Chris Walla, when he’s not working on his own solo material (an album is rumored to be scheduled for 2007), is an accomplished producer who has worked on albums for Rilo Kiley, the Decemberists, Nada Surf, and Hot Hot Heat.

Death Cab singer/songwriter Ben Gibbard cameoed on Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis’ solo debut earlier this year, singing on her cover of the Traveling Wilburys’ “Handle with Care.” Oh yeah, Gibbard’s also part of a little glitch-pop group called the Postal Service. You might have heard of them: Their debut, Give Up, is the best-selling title in Sub Pop Records’ history, beating out the Shins and even Nirvana.

Despite their roots in the Pacific Northwest, Death Cab are perhaps more closely associated with the more southerly climes of The OC. In its first-season heyday, when viewers were enthralled by the beach-set soap opera, Adam Brody’s character name-dropped the band repeatedly, and they contributed a song to one of the show’s six soundtrack albums. That endorsement helped launch the band: Plans, its 2005 Atlantic Records debut, and the first since The OC premiered, sold 90,000 copies in its first week to debut at #4 on the Billboard albums chart.

On the other hand, this mainstream exposure also placed Death Cab in the loose subgenre called (for lack of a better term) “yuppie indie,” a pejorative label that’s been slapped on the Shins, Snow Patrol, Sufjan Stevens, and any artist who’s appeared on a Zach Braff soundtrack. Musically, Death Cab might be a round peg in that category’s round hole: Their sound is indie-pop pleasant, with no blazing guitars, retro synths, or live spontaneity. Sonically, they’re about as unobtrusive as you could get, favoring slow-building songs with lilting pop hooks and soaring codas.

They’re a studio band, guided as much by Walla’s production as by Gibbard’s songwriting, and yet, beneath the pleasant sheen lurks a subtle, yet accomplished, complexity. On “Different Names for the Same Thing,” the centerpiece on Plans, the instruments relate to one another intricately: Jason McGerr’s drums play a central role, anchoring the song as the keyboards and vocal melodies swirl around it. The effect is similar to that created by the Postal Service, creating that same cog-and-gear sound but with more instruments.

Remarkably, despite the “yuppie indie” tag, Death Cab have found a young — and fervent — audience that engages very personally with the music. That’s not surprising considering Gibbard’s idiosyncratic, heart-on-sleeve lyrics. He writes for the sensitive misfits hanging around the back of the school theater, good students despite themselves. Gibbard’s lyrics have the weighty gravity of verse scrawled in homework margins, amplifying everyday confusions into mountainous emotions, yet he revels in the possibilities of high school poetry. His lyrics tend toward romantically whimsical imagery while remaining grounded in the emotional realities of loss and death.

All five of Death Cab’s full-lengths are dense with deliberately chosen concrete details (“I could taste your lipstick on the filter,” he sings on “Title Track,” from 2000’s We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes) and precocious wordplay (on “I Will Follow You into the Dark,” from Plans, he wonders what would happen “if heaven and hell decide that they both are satisfied/and illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs”).

That imagery marks everything Death Cab has recorded, reaching a peak on 2003’s Transatlanticism, generally considered their best, but growing a little too precious and forced on Plans. The album begins with “Marching Bands of Manhattan,” in which Gibbard sings this strained couplet: “If I could open my mouth wide enough for a marching band to march out/They would make your name sing and bend through alleys and bounce off all the buildings.”

At times Gibbard’s songwriting sounds simply disingenuous, as on “What Sarah Said.” He describes a scene in a hospital waiting room, recounting all the obvious details like “vending machines and year-old magazines” and dispensing pseudo-wisdom. All of this is in service to a limp coda: “I’m thinking of what Sarah said: That ‘love is watching someone die.'”

The song is cheap melodrama, with a hint of self-absorption, and, in 2005, it was outshined by Sufjan Stevens’ similar, but better, “Casimir Pulaski Day,” which describes the same scene with more sensitive attention to details and narrative. Still, it’s intriguing and admirable that Death Cab have managed to achieve this level of success, which is extremely rare for any indie band, not by diluting their idiosyncrasies but by emphasizing them.