A sharp turn for Death Cab for Cutie
CHRIS WALLA of Death Cab for Cutie thinks that the volatile state of the download-ravaged book industry calls for a fresh room to step commercial message success. "It's like firedog years nowadays," the guitar player figures. "Every unity record you sell actually stands for seven-spot."
Based in Seattle, where Walla and singer-guitarist Ben Gibbard formed the band as a home-recording fancy in 1997, Last Cab has sold about 1 1000000 copies of 2005's "Plans," its debut for Atlantic Ocean after a bowed stringed instrument of albums released by Barsuk, a hometown indie. Yet Walla says that the identification number of masses the radical plays to on tour indicates an consultation a lot larger than that. "Perchance 'Plans' would've been a 7-million-selling record in 1994!" he exclaims.
Ace trillion or 7 trillion -- either figure makes Death Cab, which besides includes bassist Nick Harmer and drummer Jason McGerr, one of the highest-profile acts of the Apostles in option rock right directly. Subsequently this month the banding will perform alongside Jack President Andrew Johnson and Roger Ethel Waters at the Coachella Valley Music & Humanities Festival in Indio, and on May 13, it's scheduled to tone ending a highly anticipated fresh album, "Pin down Stairs."
Coachella founder Paul Tollett remembers Death Cab's involvement in the festival's 2004 edition (and engagement the band at the Looking glass Theater in Pomona advantageously before that). "It's a all different animate being now," he says.
Gibbard, seated with the perch of the radical at the Le Parc Suite Hotel in Dame Rebecca West Hollywood, agrees. "This band has grown bigger than any of our wildest dreams," the frontman admits.
With that success has come a renewed willingness to experiment. Though Gibbard and his bandmates assert they made no conscious attack to challenge their fans' expectations, "Pin down Stairs" represents something of a left turn for Death Cabriolet: Where "Plans" emphasized the band's well-known knack for pretty, introspective indie pop, the newly CD explores thornier, noisier territory. "I Volition Possess Your Heart," for example, runs for more than ashcan School transactions, the offset quaternary of which proceed without Gibbard's hallmark sensitive-male vocals.
"I don't think we sabbatum devour and said, 'Let's write a 1 and make it really long,' " Harmer says. "In the soundbox of songs that we recorded, it just matte up like this was the charles Herbert Best representation of the album as a whole."
"We weren't certainly it was sledding to work as we were recording it," adds Walla, wHO also produces Death Cab's records. "Merely after it was done, every time we'd rewind and listen to the whole thing, it never got old. You know that's going away to encounter with a three-minute bingle -- the point of it is that you canful listen to it over and over. Just the fact that it was occurrent with something so long was really compelling."
A little more lively
GIBBARD says that as a resultant of the heavy touring Death Cabriolet did in support of "Plans," he "rediscovered riffing on the electric guitar" spell authorship the new album's songs, and that lED to a change in how the band operates in the studio. It recorded much of "Narrow down Stairs" know, with entirely quartet members of the band playing simultaneously. Harmer calls the action a reaction to their get making "Plans," which entailed "each player seance in the control room playing along to what other people had already played."
"It wasn't around brilliant divine revelation," Gibbard acknowledges. "The approach we took is 1 that people were pickings for the start 30 or 40 geezerhood of making rock records. Only in our digital reality, there's this attention to detail that's perchance non so necessary."
Focusing to a lesser extent on detail than on the big scene made the frontman feel like he was "making music rather than recording," he says. "On our previous records I know I didn't fiddle as often music as I did on this 1. That was very satisfying; I mind to it now and remember when we were altogether in the lapp room and this thing happened."
True to Death Cab's indie-scene roots, no one in the banding testament pick up to any anxiety o'er how "Constringe Stairs," with its unexpected break from a proven pattern, power perform commercially. "I would ne'er want to make any decisiveness based alone on trying to substantiate or trump what we achieved with 'Plans,' " says Gibbard. "Those kinds of conversations never exist betwixt us. In this day and age, what could possibly be the next spirit level, anyhow? What could we be hoping to reach?"
"Toby jug Keith could be curtain raising for us," Walla deadpans.
"There's no contention in us," Harmer admits with a laugh. "The Daniel Plainview in this band is at an all-time first gear."
Non surprisingly, Atlantic President Julie Greenwald isn't quite as nonchalant nigh the newly album's performance -- she "can't opine ['Narrow Stairs'] not doing the sami business sector ['Plans'] did." According to Greenwald, "the tonality to merchandising records at present is to be in a project for the long haul. There's no acquiring in and acquiring come out."
To that end, Greenwald says Atlantic Ocean plans to work "Pin down Stairs" for 12 to 18 months, a job she expects testament be made easier by Death Cab's popularity among Hollywood music supervisors, wHO batten songs for films, goggle box and commercials, and by its extensive touring commitments. The band's Coachella date comes in the thick of a two-month North American trek that too includes appearances at Tennessee's Bonnaroo and Booker T. Washington State's Bigfoot! festivals.
That long-term thinking matches the direction the members of Expiry Cab for Cutie think about the band. "For me," says Harmer, "the fact that we're still a band and we drive to draw another album is the biggest marker of success."
Walla is more philosophical. "What we've accomplished is the result of a combination of talent, luck and work," he says. "I'd like to cerebrate it's talent more than the other deuce, just it's belike moderately even betwixt the trey. I cognize so many great bands where it's like, 'Why aren't you famous?' But they never volition be. Cipher decides that form of poppycock."
