Transatlanticism, Death Cab for Cutie

Incredibly lyrically gifted Benjamin Gibbard, Chris Walla, Nick Harmer, and Nathan Good (all of Death Cab for Cutie) created a sickeningly beautiful indie-rock album that is by no means “underrated,” but is genuinely so deserving of all of the celebration it’s received over the past twenty-three years.

Sitting at forty-six minutes, the eleven-track album has long since established itself as a staple record, speaking to young adults navigating relationships and the heartbreak that always seems to ensue. Tracks such as Title and Registration, Tiny Vessels, and Passenger Seat perfectly capture the waxing and waning grief and pain that lead up to and follow through to the end of a relationship. This is not simply a “break-up” album, though.

Tracks like A Lack of Color and We Looked Like Giants are so intimate and raw in expressing the deep devotion we find ourselves feeling towards our significant others; this all-consuming, almost feral type of emotions that are so intense we don’t even know what to do with the entirety of it. This album so lovingly offers you a crutch in all of it, acting as a source of comfort in its own way; showing that though this love was deeply visceral, it was entirely worth what it all once stood for.

What I love most about this album is how fucking clever Gibbard is with his writing. His lyrics read as though they’re as effortless as breathing, yet they manage to articulate a slew of incredibly complicated and chest-tightening feelings so perfectly.

“Your heart is a river, that flows from your chest through every organ. Your brain is the dam, and I am the fish who can’t reach the core.” (Transatlanticism, Death Cab for Cutie, 2003)

There is something so entirely real about this metaphor: something is flowing right in front of you, something absolutely tangible,  something so real you can see it and, god, you desperately want to reach out, but there is still this impossible barrier between you and the person at the center of it all.

On A Lack of Color, the intimacy is turned up, showing this sort of plight: that being to know someone so wholly and entirely well, to have looked at someone for so long that even the strange, ordinary ways you’ve been perceiving them become expressions of how deeply you truly knew them.

“And when I see you
I really see you upside down
But my brain knows better
It picks you up and turns you around
Turns you around, turns you around.”

(A Lack of Color, 2003)

That is what gets me about this album more than anything: it is never satisfied by simply stating love is beautiful or that heartbreak hurts. It works to articulate what it actually feels like to be unabashedly consumed by another person, and somehow it keeps finding the exact words for feelings that I don’t know how to name for myself.

To say I recommend this album would be an understatement. I fucking love this record.