Rating My CD's: Indie-Pedant

15. Death Cab for Cutie -- The Photo Album

I tried with this one. I really really tried.

There's a whole swath of music that came out in the decade past that I cannot relate to in any way. I fundamentally don't "get it." Most of it falls under the rubric of "indie" rock or pop. Now, I am aware, as is anyone who's ever used the word "indie" in any piece of writing about music for the last fifteen years, that "indie" doesn't mean anything specific. It's an umbrella term that describes music bubbling up from the so-called "underground" (the pop culture's minor leagues). In this way, it's basically short for "independent" and can cover a wide variety of sounds (for purposes of clarity, I'm not going to get into the fact that the original "independent" labels, like Atlantic Records, were those that lacked their own distribution channel). And that's all perfectly fine.



But in the last fifteen years, "indie" stopped being a funding notation and started becoming an aesthetic; a kind of vague mishmash of shoegazer, alt-country, and twee. At least, I think that's where it's coming from. I honestly find every aspect of indie culture I've encountered to be so labored and nerdy that I can't be bothered to get into it. And if Death Cab for Cutie is a standard-bearer for indie music, as many think it is, then they're not helping me.

I'd like you to note that I've gotten this far without once using the word that the clerk at FYE used to describe it: "emo." To my mind, "emo" is an even worse term than "indie," as the possibility of using it as anything other than a perjorative vanished long ago. I watched as adolescents of the decade past barfed emo back up like an ippecac, by 2005 "emo sucks" had become as ubiquitous as "disco sucks" was in 1980. Defenders of disco have made great efforts in recent years to move us beyond the Saturday Night Fever/Studio 54 cliche, and then displaying the powerful originality of accusing disco detractors of racism and homophobia when that didn't work.

And it didn't work, because by 1980 disco had in fact become that endless loop of cocaine, fellatio, and "Stayin' Alive." This is what culural dissemination does: it reduces ideas to simple repeatable forms. The same thing had happened to punk rock by 1980; a movement dedicated to putting the danger, the threat, the oomph, back in rock music had become a screaming toddler that refused to be potty-trained. The Sex Pistols broke up. The Clash denied themselves. The Ramones went on tour and never came back. All that was left was a bunch of malcontents who decided that amateurism was the same as authenticity, and they gave us a few years of even more fasterlouder, called hardcore, and then fell apart by 1984.

So even if I know that the first "emo" or "emotional hardcore" bands, like Rites of Spring, existed as a hunt for space after the claustrophobia of hardcore, and even if I know that Rites of Spring sounds more like Nirvana (which is to say, Nirvana sounds like them) than anything Chris Carraba's mewled out, it doesn't change what "emo" has come to mean. By 2005 "emo" meant a bunch of boys singing about their painful lives in a manner utterly devoid of any trace of masculinity, humor or self-awareness, a Fey Pride Parade.

Understand that the above is not in any way an anti-gay slur. I never saw a lot of gay kids listening to emo; they tended towards the kind of over-the-top pop that Christina Aguilera and Lady GaGa trade in. Most emo fans tended to be straight suburban girls and boys, who found the connection between pretty melodies and up-front emotionality satisfying in some way.

Just such a suburban white girl, clerking at an FYE in Bel Air, MD, enthusiastically recommended The Photo Album, Death Cab's 2001 release, precisely because it was "good emo." I was in one of those occasional moods, ruts really, where I long to expand my palette of stuff to listen to. I heard a lot of good noise in the trades about Death Cab, so I plunked down the $7.99 for a used copy.

I'm trying to remember if I've ever listened to it all the way through. I don't think so. I may even have tossed the CD out after the first track the first time I listened to it. It's that kind of album, that you continually give second chances to, that you endlessly say "Hey, maybe it's me..." about, but that never fails to redeem your trust in it. The Photo Album is the musical equivalent of a bad girlfriend.

And like a bad girlfriend, there are parts about it that you do like. The band plays well, has fine, sparse beats, interesting guitar lines, strong melodic interplay. But all of this sits in the background of the vocals, which, charitably put, distract from the strength of the band.

Un-charitably put, the vocals go somewhere beyond irritating, into actively sickening. I don't know how to explain it. It's not the lyrics, which I rarely pay attention to. It's not that he's singing sad songs about heartbreak; if that was my problem, I couldn't listen to anything but prog-rock and fusion jazz. It's just that I find it really hard to describe Ben Gibbard's vocal performances without using words like "affected," "pretentious," and "fey." Maybe getting that level of emotional immediacy from another dude just makes me uncomfortable, but I honestly don't see what there is in Gibbard's whispery "singing" that should be called good.

And that pretty much ruins it for me. Good music shouldn't give you a boredom-headache, even when it's challenging your notions of what good music is. Since this record does that to me, despite numerous opportunities to do anything else, I'm giving it the lowest grade.

Grade: C