For more than twenty years Ben Gibbard has been honing the sound of Death Cab For Cutie, trying to distill what they do to a set of musical fragments that, when played together, make up a melodic whole.
On “Here To Forever” he may just have mastered that technique.
To my mind, modern Death Cab has a nice balance between polished modern production and a slightly edgy indie band sound. On “Here To Forever” I feel they’ve got that balance perfectly.
I got into the band just after they released “Plans” and then discovered “Transatlanticism” soon after. Both those albums are big favourites of mine and I can hear the DNA of songs like “Soul Meets Body”, “Crooked Teeth”, “The New Year”, and “The Sound Of Settling” in this new track.
The difference with this one is a subtle but distinct one. That distillation, that sifting through what makes up a song and makes the melody work and connect whilst using only the essential elements needed to get that across, what to put in and what to leave out, has become a more familiar thing to the band and they’ve managed to throw little riffs from guitar and keyboard in to the track without, for example, having to strum chords all the way through, and it creates a fantastic balance between the track sounding quite hard, edgy, and sparse and yet still nicely melodic and full-sounding as a whole track.
It’s a neat trick and one I’m happy to admit that I will be shamelessly borrowing from it for my music in the next few months.
Gibbard’s voice is a singular thing to hear over the top of these indie songs. I often think a singer’s voice is the number one reason someone likes or dislikes a band and this voice is a light, sometimes almost angelic thing. I don’t think he ever screams anything out – I keep thinking (only in a very vague way) of Roy Orbison which is a very strange comparison as they seem worlds away from each other. Am I wrong? Answers on a postcard!!
All I know is, Gibbard’s singing sets them apart, it’s a distinct and unique voice and here, it mixes into the track perfectly.
The track starts fast and urgent, their newfound synth parts are used to accentuate moments in that musical jigsaw arrangement and the track jumps straight into Gibbard’s enticing poetic lyrics.
And Ben Gibbard’s lyrics are another reason I’m so fond of Death Cab For Cutie.
I would argue that he’s one of the best lyricists of the modern age.
The verses in “Here To Forever” wander around ideas that will be familiar to any regular Death Cab listeners. A predilection for being a slave to fate, or being unable to escape the choices you make, past, present, or future.
And yet he starts with this:
In every movie I watch from the ’50s
There’s only one thought that swirls around my head now
And that’s that everyone there on the screen
Yeah, everyone there on the screen
Well, they’re all dead now
They’re all dead now
And then he mourns the fact that:
It ain’t easy living above
And I can’t help but keep falling in love
With bones and ashes
In the second verse, he addresses the angst of mortals (and himself) more blatantly:
Oh, these days it’s so hard to relax
You gotta hold a gun to my back
To make me smile
To make me smile
And the only way I seem to cope
Is by trying to hold onto hope
If just for a while
But the moment that this song really takes off, as it should, is in the chorus.
The melody is kept in that strange middle ground that the rest of the song occupies, not cheery, not miserable, but motoring along somewhere in-between, still urgent and slightly hard-edged. And the words are a summary of the varied musings of the verses:
I wanna know the measure
From here to forever
What a line! Forgive me for waxing lyrical (pun most definitely intended), but the choice of words here are inspired and the words you choose, in my opinion, are what makes a good lyric potentially great.
He wants to know the measure, not the meaning, or power, or grace, or any of a hundred other words. He wants the measure. He wants to look at his life and measure, like a mathematician, where he fits, he’s acting as a scientist or observer. It’s such a clever word to choose and gives such space to the listener to interpret why he wants to measure it rather than feel it, or worship it, or succumb to it.
And then, if that wasn’t enough, he goes one better with the next line:
And I wanna feel the pressure
Of God or whatever
Now he wants to stop being a scientist, or perhaps alongside his scientific side he desires some faith, some message from beyond, but again he chooses a word that throws ambiguity all over the place. He wants to feel the pressure of God. Pressure as a word could mean that God is literally pressing down on you, or it could mean there is a pressure to keep the faith which, in this day and age, is probably accurate. Whichever way you interpret it, it’s an inspired word to choose.
But he doesn’t stop there. He adds or whatever as if to say I want to feel God, or maybe another spiritual being, or aliens, or Bigfoot – it’s a deliberate tripping up of the reverential, it’s a joke, its a get-out-clause, it’s a way of saying i want to feel God or we could just go for a coffee. And it’s an utterly brilliant line to finish the chorus with.
Despite the musings over death and the endless eternity that we only briefly visit, “Here To Forever” confirms that Death Cab For Cutie are very much alive and well, and as brilliant and vibrant as ever.
