plorentz's Full Review: Plans by Death Cab For Cutie
The picture moves in fast motion, but the road goes on so long and so straight that it almost feels like no motion at all; and all you see is her soft red hair endlessly fluttering, fluttering, fluttering, silhouetted by the daylight she's moving ineffably toward, and the corner of her tear-swollen eye in the rear view mirror.
FADE TO WHITE
Death Cab For Cutie may not have provided the soundtrack to that long last look at Six Feet Under, but their newest album Plans (their first for a major label) sounds like it was wholly inspired by Lauren Ambrose and her epic portrayal of Claire Fisher, the unlikely heroine and ultimate centerpiece of that series. In the celestial shimmer of these songs, their apparently effortless beauty, the way in which they seem so obvious, but aren't quite; the way they ponder life and death as if such things were as scrumptiously mundane as buttered English muffins and clean white socks; there's Claire again.
Or then again, maybe I'm just selfishly projecting my grief onto this poor, unsuspecting record - grief that the only scripted TV show I care about has proven as mortal and finite as it's always reminded us that we are. After all, Plans couldn't possibly be that good. But it certainly wants to be. And, sometimes it almost is.
Here comes a spoiler.
My gawd. Did you see how long Claire lives? She outlives everyone. She lives closer to forever than most of us would ever hope to. And just the thought of that, that she's so alone at the end, with her eyes all blinded, laying in her death bed, struggling to make out the faces in the vividly colored, tidily framed pictures on her wall, juxtaposed with the solo journey that her younger, more vibrant, more conflicted and terrified self has embarked upon in her newly purchased hybrid car, so full of uncertainty, self-doubt, and raw courage, on that road where no matter how fast you're moving, it seems like you're not moving, because at the time, it just seems so endless, like there really is no destination, except for the one chosen for us by death, that silent, ever-present back seat driver... it all just gives me the shivers. Every time I even just think about it.
FADE TO WHITE
There's nothing like that on Plans.
Well, okay, there is one song - "What Sarah Said" - that's sorta like that. It starts out with one of those pretty piano figures. Because songs with the kind of waiting-room survivor-guilt lyrics this song has - I ration my breaths as I say to myself that I've already taken too much today - always start with pretty piano figures, and prettily chiming two-string guitar harmonies, and stumbly, pounded-out rhythms; and then, Ben Gibbard's super-sensitive indie-boy tenor, just one of a multitude of similar-sounding, super-sensitive indie-boys, singing -
I'm thinking of what Sarah said
'Love is watching someone die.'
And then, leading into an instrumental epilogue as expansive, as beautiful, as empty and possible as Claire Fisher's physical and metaphysical interstate highway, he wonders, almost under his breath: So who's going to watch you die? Who's going to watch you die? Who's going to watch you die?
Maybe no one.
Scary thought, and at a bountiful six-and-a-half minutes, with the first three filled with harrowingly lovely hospital waiting room imagery - a television set entertaining itself - Gibbard and his merry band give us plenty of time to contemplate it. It's one of the prettiest death moments on an album full of pretty death moments.
But if Death Cab for Cutie were really interested in doing something daring and visionary, they might have given us sixteen minutes of "What Sarah Said". Or maybe instead of dissolving it into a pretty cloud, fading briefly to white, and re-emerging with another pretty death song, they might have bashed that song's head in with the kind of raw, violent, self-destructive anger an untimely death so often inspires in real life.
I mean, really. Before Clair can take her road trip to centegenarianism, she has to get fired from her job, she has to piss everyone in her whole world off, she has to get wasted and nearly kill herself, crashing the old family hearse on an unpaved road near the spot where her suddenly dead brother was buried (in that grotesquely organic hippie sorta way)...
FADE TO WHITE
There really is nothing like that on Death Cab for Cutie's Plans.
Well, okay. There is the forboding, almost gothic soothsay of "Someday You Will Be Loved", the album's noisiest, poundingest, angriest sounding track. And in "Your Heart Is An Empty Room", Gibbard burns down a house full of a life's memories, and curses a world where lives go on as easily they end. But those cathartic verses are obscured by the album's general prettiness; the echoey piano chords and distant opening vocals of "Different Names for the Same Thing" sounding more like one of Electric Light Orchestra's spacier classic rock contemplations; the lead single "Soul Meets Body" setting pop spiritualism to a glorious pop beat, with prismatic sparkles and an unabashedly corny ba-da ba-da-bah break between its pretty-pretty, oh-so-likable verses.
It's all so pleasant, so easy-sounding, so ingratiating. It really is easy to love these songs; but ultimately, they leave us longing for something a little more substantial and elusive. Where's the nonlinearity of everything? Where's the grim weirdness? Where's the dorky bald guy in cheap grey Wal-Mart slacks who, in probably his life's greatest moment of heroism - the story of which he's likely already writing in his memory to be passed on to the grandchildren he doesn't have yet (and at his advanced, childless age, probably won't ever have) - gets ripped in half by a suddenly and unexpectedly resuscitated elevator car.
FADE TO WHITE
"Every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time," Gibbard sings; and ultimately, it's not what Plans lacks that makes it less than what it could be. It's what it doesn't lack: namely, a plan. It all feels a little too orchestrated, too under-our-control, too big-and-non-accidental, too manageable and reasonable and rational; and perhaps most importantly, too marketable for itself. There are parts of this record that are genuinely moving, and the band's ambition is clearly admirable.
But, too often, it feels like Plans was merely planned as a soundtrack for an admittedly really awesome TV series (or, at least, The O.C.).
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Plans" by Death Cab For Cutie
Atlantic Records
Released 8/30/05
Produced by Chris Walla
44 min.
SONGS: Marching Bands of Manhattan - Soul Meets Body - Summer Skin - Different Names for the Same Thing - I Will Follow You Into the Dark - Your Heart is an Empty Room - Someday You Will Be Loved - Crooked Teeth - What Sarah Said - Brothers on a Hotel Bed - Stable Song
Seattle rockers Death Cab for Cutie return with their fifth album Plans. Produced by Death Cab s own Christopher Walla and recorded in upstate NY and ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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