Coming Together

Things are coming together for Death Cab For Cutie. This Northwestern quartet of astute young men, who just released their second album to good reviews, are finding their name spreading across the land like wildfire. They’ve been garnering both critical and fan-originated acclaim for their latest release, We Have All The Facts and We’re Voting Yes (Barsuk Records), and their live show. It’s all coming together pretty quickly for a band who recorded the most recent effort without a concrete drummer.

"I play drums on the new album, for the most part, and we had our old drummer come and play a few songs because he was available at the time," explains Death Cab frontman, guitarist and singer Benjamin Gibbard. He’s at home in Washington, preparing to hit the road on tour (the first stop of which is Chico’s own The Blue Room). This will be the first real outing (minus a gig at the Noise Pop 2000 festival last month in San Francisco) with the group’s new drummer, Chico expatriate Michael Schorr (formerly of Uncle Roscoe). "We toured with someone through last summer, but we didn’t sound very good with this guy and it just wasn’t working out on a lot of levels so we let him go."

"We met Michael through Larry Crane," continues Gibbard. Crane, like Schorr is a former Chicoan, and now owns and operates one of the Northwest’s most successful and busiest recording facilities, Jackpot! Studios. Crane thought that the marriage between Michael’s drumming and the rest of Death Cab would be a fine one indeed. It seems he was right.

"I got lucky, more or less. I was just kind of in the right place at the right time," tells Schorr from his current home in the Northwest. He first saw Death Cab with Crane in Portland some months back, and when Crane hooked up Schorr with the band, things seems to work right away. "We talked a couple of times, I learned some songs and went to an audition. That was that. That’s why I say it was kind of lucky, because it was so straight forward."

"It worked out really well," says Gibbard. "We started rehearsing in December, and Michael’s just a super rad guy, a really good drummer and he really gels well with everybody. Personality-wise, he fills out the four of us really well."

For Schorr, it’s a chance to not only play music with a band that works pretty regularly, but also a chance to expand on his own playing—especially since all of the material he’s starting with was written by someone else.

"It’s a good chance to look at playing from someone else’s perspective because I didn’t come into the band and write all new drum parts," explains Schorr. "It’s more or less verbatim from what’s on the album, and that was a great challenge. I can play pop, but I wouldn’t consider it my forte. When I normally just bust stuff out, I tend to play less from the gut and more from the brain. So this has been a really great lesson. It’s more from the gut and less from the brain, and I like that. They were keen on finding someone who fit in too. Everything just clicked.

That’s is a good thing, not just because the band is about to spend some time on the road, but with a new album out, it’s important to make sure that everything is on track with the music and the players. We Have All the Facts… is already doing pretty well, and Death Cab—Gibbard, Schorr, Christopher Walla (guitar, organ and vocals) and Nicholas Harmer (bass)—is taking the success with the youthful exuberance of a band that’s still trying to make a name for itself.

"I’m really happy with it. At this point it’s kind of like saying your name too many times, it starts sounding wrong," jokes Gibbard. "But yeah, I’m really happy with it and people seem to be liking it and I’m just really excited about getting out to promote it and see who’s ended up with it so far."

Odds are that fans of the last Death Cab record, Something About Airplanes (Elsinor/Barsuk), will be drawn in by the new record. But also, with a rapidly growing following, there will be new folks drawn into the music as well. Though there are similarities between the two albums, We Have All The Facts… is more mellow, the product of a three piece rather than a four-piece.

"I would like to think that this record is a bit quieter than the last one. There’s less full-on rock," says Gibbard. "…which is fine. I don’t know if that’s the direction we’re going to continue in or not, but the songs came together pretty much right after the first album came out. And the three of us did some more writing on a couple of tracks, which turned out to be some of the better tracks, so that may be a direction we may move it. For the most part I’m the primary songwriter and always have been, but the things that always seem to work out are the things that the three of us write together, and now the four of us."

One could surmise that the mellowness of the new album came out of a time when the band didn’t have a drummer, but that’s not the case.

"A lot of the material was written even when Nathan [first drummer] was playing with us, but part of it may be that a lot of [We Have All The Facts…] was written in the winter, and Northwest winters are usually pretty somber. A lot of the material on the first record was written after a situation in which a certain lady did me wrong, and that came in the spring and summer. So I don’t know, I think it’s a little too early to tell if we’re heading in one direction or the other. Whatever comes out just kind of comes out, and I don’t think that it’s until after the fact that you can really look at a pattern."

And Death Cab may have some ways to go before they’re able to figure out exactly where they’re going. And despite having a solid three years under their collective belt, Gibbard says that, because things are just now really starting to happen for them, the band still feels young.

"We still feel the excitement of getting the record back and having it in our hands, and over the fact that we’ve been doing as well as we have, definitely in the Northwest and now outside of the Northwest. It’s interesting to think about being in this band for coming up on three years now, and having people just now hearing us and getting into us—It’s pretty exciting. And when you play the old stuff and new people haven’t heard them before, it kind of renews the old songs."

The new album’s material might be softer than the older stuff, but during live performances, the band has a great time and it shows. They’re not ashamed of rocking out and moving around, and that comes across in the live performance.

"We definitely bring up the volume and the tempos," says Schorr about the live show. "And with some of the dynamics, we can really stretch out live."

"We just love playing together—We just rock out and have a good time," adds Gibbard. "We have a good time playing with each other and I hope that it doesn’t come off in a hokey way. We rock out, we move around a lot when we play and for the most, part we have a really high energy show."

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