Death Cab for Cutie - You Can Play These Songs with Chords
MusicMash Rating: not rated yet
Pitchfork Media Rating: 6.4
Wanna make a home copy of You Can Play These Songs with Chords for free, without taking your chances
of drawing the RIAA's ire and endangering your ability to hold political office in the future? Dust off a
vinyl copy of Death Cab's 1999 debut Something About Airplanes, dig out that old Fisher-Price record
player (the tan-colored one with the fat needle), stick a pillow over the speaker, and play it at about 27
rpm. Wal-la!
This Mr. Wizard solution works because the meat of You Can Play These Songs with Chords is a reissue
of the band's treasured demo tape of the same name, eight ultra-lo-fi recordings released on cutting-edge
cassette format back in the simpler times of 1998 when said band was comprised only of Ben Gibbard and Chris
Walla. Five of the eight songs later turned up with increased fidelity on the official debut, Something
About Airplanes, and like most of that album, the representatives here contain at least one great moment
surrounded by a lot of mere goodness: the envelope-glue sweetness of organ-laced "President of What?", the
subtle guitar melody shift a minute into "Champagne in a Paper Cup", the "I'm def-in-ite-ly shaking" segment
of "Pictures at an Exhibition".
So, these five tracks were obviously enough to plant the seeds for a happy indie label contract, but what of
the other three? Well, two of them (the surprisingly punk-paced "That's Incentive" and pleasantly forgettable
"Hindsight") weren't done much injustice by languishing in obscurity, but "Two Cars" was worth digging out of
the attic. Melancholy/playful organ complementing Gibbard's nice guy vocals, simple Walla-brand production,
and non-flashy drumming keep the song appropriately approachable-- it's almost mopey-friend enough to fit on
the band's high water mark We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes.
Eight songs and twenty-nine minutes leave a lot of blank disc space, though, so Barsuk has graciously filled
out the package with assorted breakup-rumor-starting rarities, to the point of outweighing the featured
material 10-to-8. Too bad the first five of these are, frankly, rather embarrassing, representing an era
that suggests the image of Death Cab as high school band playing graduation parties. Heretofore unknown
tendencies to sound like a) They Might Be Giants fans ("TV Trays," "Tomorrow"), b) by-numbers pop-punk
("New Candles," an unwisely suped-up "This Charming Man" cover), and c) vocal sample experimentalists
("Flustered/Hey Tomcat") all come back to haunt, like yearbook photos from when you used to part your
hair.
The latter five tracks, collecting seven-inch odds-and-sods for vinyl-phobes, fare a bit better, as they
feature later incarnations of DCFC more confident in their dreamy sound. "State Street Residential" and
"Army Corps of Architects" are wobbly first steps exploring the vaguely slowcore epic approach employed on
the Stability EP, while the cover of Secret Stars' "Wait" is obvious, but plays to DCFC's strengths
when they put their guitar thang down, flip it, and reverse it (er, subtly) all over the coda. An early
version of "Song for Kelly Huckaby" is the one useless inclusion of this quintet, which otherwise as a
package comes...
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