Some records become big personal things, like rickety cars that stop and pick up your hitch-hiking head to take it where you want to go, or atleast as close as it is willing to take you. Whether it's anywhere but here, or somewhere particular. For me, Death Cab For Cutie's "Narrow Stairs" (released last Tuesday) became one such experience.I haven't read "Big Sur."
As an obvious star gazer of Jack Kerouac's, I know full well I should. But shying away from Jack's swan song is not so much of ignorance as it is fear.
I know the novel's chapters spell the end of Kerouac's road and I know it ain't pretty. It's mired in longing, as always, but is sunken deep in a much danker and lonelier world than his preceding works. It's night time falling, and at 24, I'm not ready to sink into that sadness. I still want to believe in the road. The wide open world without locks, keys, shackles. Everything dancing, bopping, blasting and blaring, shining, wild, on fire and free. Branches blowing violently in the wind, leaves shaken miles and miles away into the woods, long long ways from home. That's where I'm at. (Even though, I live in the house where I grew up, my mind nor heart is never, ever here.)
I'm still too steeped in naivety to face such a written work.
I still believe in trees running around without roots in the ground.
I still believe in the American dream.
So I'll read "Big Sur" when I'm ready to face reality, square in his droopy, bloodshot eyes.
Death Cab For Cutie brainchild/frontman/songwriter, Ben Gibbard, however,
has read "Big Sur."
Better yet, he wrote a part of "Narrow Stairs" in the same cabin where Jack himself wrote "Big Sur." Gibby even wrote
an essay titled "The Meaning Of Life" about the whole experience, which you should read if you plan on giving the album any real spin, which I do recommend you should.
Ben went to the cabin, lost, and in search of Jack's fervent wisdom. He wanted to know the next step.
When I peeled off the wrapping of the new Death Cab record and opened up the CD tray in my bedroom, I wasn't one bit different; I came to Ben, looking for wisdom, the next curve. Where does the next bend in the road take me? Tell me, Ben. I know you know. "I want to know my fate."
The odd thing is, no Death Cab record has
ever spilled fourth one nugget of truth or visionary wisdom. Their best songs have reveled in both sad struggles and life's most cheery-eyed moments; all the bumps in the road. But they never plotted me a map, never spouted me off a set of directions. (Though, their awesome supplemental music vid DVD to "Plans" was CALLED "Directions.")
And yet, I slipped on my headphones looking for a road sign that read "Revelations-next 11 tracks." I did this because their songs carve up this unique little language for me; A whole new cursive world, rife with a chaotic sadness that somehow unearths a glimmer of hope in a deep coal mine of despair.
Think about it. Many of us slipped right into Ben's shoes when he found his ex girlfriend's picture in his glove box while being pulled over by a cop ("Title & Registration"). His songs are our songs, and they're all about where we pulled over on the side of the road and had to just re-think about how we got there. They put you in the driver seat, but they were never ever about where we were actually going. We asked if we should be somewhere else? Should you have stayed with someone else? Should you have made a different choice? They're question songs, not answer songs. But Death Cab keep asking the right questions, so I keep expecting answers, though I should know by now I'm not gonna get them.
But this has never been as clear as on "Narrow Stairs." Ben begins the record where Jack ends, at "Bixby Canyon Bridge." The song begins soft, sweet, serene as Ben descends "into a dusty gravel ridge." He looks around, raises some wet, muddy gravel from the shallow creek bottom and lets it fall through his fingers back into the water. He waits for Jack's spirit to rise up, smirk at him and say "Ben, I'm so glad you've come. I've been waiting for you. What you have been searching for your entire life, is here, trickling in the water. Ask me anything, I have your answers."
Bixby Canyon Bridge
But nothing happens. The world turns.
The wind blows through the canyon. The sun sets, slowly. The soft current of water trickles around Ben's bare feet. Ben talks to himself, and Jack and his answers never rise up through the earth's cracks.
It's like being young.
Then Ben's voice disappears into a rush of tightly wound drum skin pounding and angular guitar feedback swirls that fill the speakers with disenchanting spirals of out-of-control noise. And you try to make sense out of it, to separate the notes, to find Ben buried in the mess. You try to dissect the nonsense and find yourself as lost as Ben surely felt, standing there like a cold, wet moron in the water.
It's like realizing you're getting older.
And then it fades back to soft and airy, the sound of the world spinning slowly. And Ben's voice rises back to the surface, only to say that he turns around and leaves, no closer to the truth, no closer to knowing what this "American Dream" really is. And Jack probably never found it either. So, perhaps, in a way, Ben did find Jack. It's just not the Jack he had dreamed for so long of meeting.
"I cursed myself for being surprised that this didn’t play like it did in my mind," he sings.
It's like waking up from the American dream. With a really bad hangover.
The rest of the album is caked in this thick dreary mud from Bixby Canyon's Bridge. It's tighter, and much more aimless than anything they've written before. Whereas their 2 previous records were wide open and emotionally expansive (not unlike the first half of "On The Road"), "Narrow Stairs" walks quietly down a back alley with it's hands in it's pockets, totally unsure of itself or where to go. But that's not to say it's dead weight floating along with a lack on ambition.
The nearly 9-minute first single "I Will Possess Your Heart" is hardly unambitious. In fact, the song leaps right back into a world of longing and hopeful dreams, which we just learned in the first song leads to no more than dead ends and more questions. Backed by a propulsive bass line and cathartic piano twinkles, the frigid song shakes off it's icy arms easily with Ben obsessing over a girl he knows he could get to unconditionally love him if she would just give him her time of day. The music critic circuit has aptly billed the song the ultimate stalker song this side of "Every Breath You Take," but what romantic stud hasn't felt that convinced about a girl, at least once?
The album continues to dive into a more lunar world than the road trip soundscapes which spanned their past few records. But it's pretty lively for something that makes life seem so sad and heavy with gravity. Ben watches his inner optimist die in "No Sunlight" and watches from a hillside as grapevines burn in a roaring out of control fire while firefighters pray for heavy downpours of rain (in all likelihood, this is of the California wild fires from last year), but the songs are all entwined in their own patches of fruitful chords.
He even watches a friend give up on hopes, dreams, and love in the excellent "Your New Twin-Sized Bed." "What's the point in holding onto something that never gets used," he sings.
And the album comes seemingly close to some sort of end on a cold and lonely note, with "The Ice Is Getting Thinner." It doesn't mark the end of the relationship Ben sings of, but he knows an end is looming, just a few degrees away from finishing off the sheet of ice he sits on. In the past, he would have written this song from the perspective of the ice being half-frozen, but after his trip to "Bixby Canyon Bridge," it's half-melted.
It'd be a stretch to call this the best record of the year. (The album lost serious points for packaging it with the most difficult lyric book to pull out of the plastic case, EVER!) But the most personal account? The one that has the most to say to a guy who's looking for a little direction and noise in his currently quiet life? That, it most certainly is.
It makes me want to connect with the ethereal muse that Jack and Ben and so many others found out there in the wide open, even though it specifically shows that catching such spirits and such experiences does nothing to help you get any inches closer to what you're really after--that American Dream, God, love, success, whatever; the fabled end of the road.
I think, as a country, we're starting to carve up the American dream again. It went in hiding for a few decades. But it's coming back. I see it all over the place. I feel it. I see it. And who can blame us? We need something to believe in again. This record puts it that into song, and is perhaps, the shape of dreams to come.
What better to dream, than waking from the wickedness of an unforgiving nightmare, to find the road has no end? That's an answer worth embarking out into the world and searching under every single stone for, and one I'm prepared to do.
Labels: album review, Ben Gibbard, Big Sur, Death Cab For Cutie, jack kerouc, Narrow Stairs, On The Road
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Some of my favorite all time records have come from groups like The Clash, Against Me, and Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band. And while these 3 firecracker groups are often regarded as scathing political preachers when it comes to their music; politics have absolutely nothing to do with what I admire about "London Calling," "Born In The USA," "Sandinista" or "New Wave."
It's as Joe Strummer as it is Bruce Springsteen. Energy, energy, energy, with warm and melodic delivery. Heck, you could even say it's like a good Alkaline Trio album without all the goth, blood, and self-loathing. Think of Springsteen's "The River" with a shot of adrenaline in the arm. And for a group that clearly worships Strummer and Springsteen with equal twinkle, there is nothing political and nothing to preach on a single song; just love, struggle and hard blue collar work from corner to corner.
