Being a young adult is hard. Feelings, so much feelings — and most of them get in the way of expressing yourself. Which is why we have Death Cab For Cutie. Whether we knew about them from a cool older sibling or from hit TV show The OC when 00s alt-teen dream Seth Cohen put on ‘Movie Script Ending’ on a road trip with his ‘mainstream’ company consisting crush, her best friend, and his foster brother. What did his lady friend say? “It’s like one guitar, and a whole lot of complaining.” Oh the anguish.
This is not the first time Death Cab For Cutie is playing in Singapore. They’ve done it before — twice as a matter of fact. Years have passed, one of their members have left, the band put out an album aptly named Kintsugi, referring to the Japanese art of putting together broken ceramic to make it new again. They’ve aged, heck, we’ve aged — and this was no longer the band of my adolescent years.
No denying they sounded majestic, the new additions seemed to be bringing to the plate a more stadium rock feel — which is an odd departure to their ‘indie rock success story’ label. It is not a bad thing I guess, progression is key and nothing indie lasts forever.
This 2016 batch of Death Cab gig-goers was a mix of old and new. Classics like ‘Soul Meets Body’ and ‘The New Year’ sounded grandiose and re-energised, and brought the nostalgic kids to a singalong, while newly initiated fans would get excited whenever a track from Kintsugi came on, and politely swayed to tracks they were unfamiliar with. To the latter, it was an exciting time to be catching the elders of indie rock music, and for the former — well it was a chill ride on the passenger seat.
If aiming to please was what they had in mind, Death Cab had succeeded. The setlist was a polite and delicate balance of old favourites as well as a respectable amount of their new material. There were moments of tenderness, when Ben Gibbard whipped out the solitary guitar for ‘I Will Follow You Into The Dark’ and then of course the spectacular closer of ‘Transatlanticism’ — moments that reminded you of who you used to be. And as they sang “So who’s going to watch you die” in ‘What Sarah Said’, I saw right there, a moment of reflection and revelation: the death of teenage nostalgia. Sure it was morbid, but it was also strangely (and wonderfully) liberating.
