There’s a type of music that turns up on the soundtrack of programmes like Dawson’s Creek, Party Of Five, One Tree Hill and The OC. It’s particularly useful for montages of troubled good-looking, young people gazing mournfully out of windows at the rain. Lyrically it never gets too specific so that it can act as a kind of tabula rasa for whatever’s happening in the inane plot. And the music itself can never distract too much from Dylan or Tommy or Lucas or Dawson or Butchie or Ted or Zane (or whoever the hero is), so it’s usually comprised of an earthy, four-four, indie-lite, folk-based substance and features uncontroversial instruments such as acoustic guitars, bass, drums, piano, and Edge-like “glistening” guitar arpeggios.
There’s also usually some inoffensive ‘soulful’ singing prominently mixed into the middle of it, in which the singer emotes all over the place like he’s never going to run out of tissue paper. Usually this emoting doesn’t tackle more hard-hitting and basic human emotions (such as “I’m horny”, “I want to hit you”, “We’re all going to die!” or “I want a fugging sandwich!”). No, what the generic singer of this genre emotes is ‘angst’. And angst when it’s expressed sounds a little like the word itself sounds – nasal, whiney and sexless.
Anyway, Death Cab For Cutie fit into that category of generic rent-a-vague-emotion music, but to be fair they aren’t the worst. There are some attempts here at pushing the boundaries slightly with some nice poetic analogies (particularly on ‘Bixby Canyon Bridge’ and ‘I Will Possess Your Heart’) and big solid stately song structures sometimes veering into restrained epic riffery.
Generally, however, this is epic, self-important pop music designed for people with vague unspecified ambitions and emotions and vague unspecified worries and fears. I can’t really understand why anyone would make them their favourite band or anything, but then there are many, many things about the world I don’t understand.