Live Review: Death Cab for Cutie at Edgefield, 7/8

There was a brief moment in the mid-2000s when this tiny band from a quaint college town in Washington named Death Cab for Cutie threatened to become the Most Important Band In America. Spin featured the group in a cover story that touted the quartet as the “next R.E.M.” They were even name-checked on The O.C. as the favorite band of the show’s resident emotive over-thinker, Seth Cohen, which cemented the soft-spoken quartet as the essential “nice guy” band of the era. 

The tide has since turned on the notion of being a "nice guy." While the tone and aesthetic of emo shifted to the pent-up aggression of post-hardcore, Death Cab For Cutie stayed put. While dudes who thought girls were (to paraphrase a keen riposte of one of the worst "nice guy" essays ever written) "just machines where you put 'I'm nice to you' tokens [or mix CDs with "We Looked Like Giants" on them] until sex comes out" put on skinny jeans and started headbanging, Ben Gibbard and company charted the safest course possible toward crowd-pleasing mediocrity. Next stop: a grassy amphitheater on the outskirts of your hometown. Don't forget to bring a blanket!

While the crowd at Edgefield on July 8 was divided evenly between spry 20-somethings and middle-aged folk accessorizing with red wine and foldable Tommy Bahama beach chairs, this is no indictment against the headliner. Edgefield is just so damned pleasant. Why wouldn't you go if there's nothing else to do? The bigger question mark of the evening, however, was how deep the setlist would dive into the group's catalog on its first tour since last year's departure of guitarist Chris Walla. 

The set opened with “No Room In Frame,” a quintessentially slow-burning Death Cab number that also opens its first post-Walla record, Kintsugi. The newer tracks were adequate in proving Gibbard's skill as an arranger and songsmith on his own, but the warbling crescendos that made 2003's Transatlanticism an instant classic are sorely missed when cuts like “You’ve Haunted Me All My Life” and “Everything’s A Ceiling” are finally aired-out in a live setting. This is no knock on Dave Depper, the Portlander made good as Walla’s touring replacement, and his ability to fill the role as Gibbard’s melodic counterpart. He crushed it as much as anyone possibly could given the material. But I’d definitely be lying if I said I didn’t spend 75 percent of the show wishing I had a sweet beach chair with an insulated cup holder to zone out in.

When you see a band with nine full-length records under their belt live, it's a logical concession that you won't hear all your favorite songs. My biggest beef with bands of Death Cab's stature is that my idea of what's their most vital work doesn't jibe with the personnel tasked with writing the setlist. No recent Death Cab show can ever have enough songs from Transatlanticism on the agenda (well, except that one time two summers ago when they played it front-to-back), but their choice to devote 22 of the 24 songs played to their newer radio-friendly hits felt like a gently flipped bird to the legions of fans like myself who cared deeply enough about them to get them up on such a huge stage in the first place. 

A blow-by-blow account of the disappointment is useless, but I had an acute sense of the lowest and highest points of the show, which were a flaccid solo rendition of the pro-suicide tearjerker “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” and a vaguely anthemic yet truncated encore of “Transatlanticism.” I had every inclination to hold out hope that Death Cab still has at least the faintest interest in courting older fans who may have made out to their early tracks when they were still “learning how each others bodies worked,” but the endless volley of KNRK singles proves that it’s just not so. At least I still have Jimmy Eat World to hold my hand. 

All photos by Courtney Theim.

WWeek 2015