I'm Voting Yes
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, Death Cab for Cutie is a bunch of sellouts, Ben Gibbard is doe-eyed pretty-boy emo cheese, and the band is MTV fluff for seventeen year old post-punk softies who’ve just been dumped. Maybe, whatever, I don’t care. Cause you know what? They’re good.
Trying to decide whether or not to send this to my friend in victoria
— Tony Comstock · Mar 2, 12:54 PM · #
So she badgered me until I sent her the link and I sent to her and she’s still my friend so I guess it was the right thing to do.
— Tony Comstock · Mar 2, 02:52 PM · #
“Cause you know what? They’re good.”
Death Cab For Cutie good.
Fire bad.
— cw · Mar 2, 04:50 PM · #
Cute song, and I don’t think anyone is arguing that DCFC has suddenly become awful. But We Have The Facts and The Photo Album are simply much better albums than their recent stuff, and it’s disappointing to watch a band settle for what frequently comes off as easy listening elevator music when they’ve put out so much good stuff in the past.
— Will · Mar 2, 07:11 PM · #
I’ll second Will’s point. Those albums were great, but Plans is pretty rotten. So bad, in fact, that I’ve not bothered with the new album.
— Matt Stokes · Mar 2, 08:26 PM · #
Yeah. I agree there. But I don’t think Plans, etc. are rotten — just a little more polished, a little more sentimental, and since polished sentimentality is one of the things that DCFC does so damn well, I don’t really see a reason to complain.
— Peter Suderman · Mar 2, 09:01 PM · #
I chatted some more with my Australian friend. A woman she used to work with was devoured by the Victoria Fires, along with the rest of her family; save one daughter who ran for her life to a nearby reservoir. The girl was badly burned but survived.
I grew up in Southern California, and remember fires in the news (though none ever came near our house,) and I think this video must be set somewhere in my youth. The houses, cars, clothes all fit, and I have to assume the “grapevine” is the song is the same area I remember from when we’d take car trips North.
This song/video seems like an odd starting point for whether or not this band had declined or sold out or let down the fans who were downloading MP3s off the band’s myspace page before they got a record deal. Art is curious that way; the responses it can provoke are often unexpected.
— Tony Comstock · Mar 3, 01:09 PM · #