| Print |

Written by Jason Green Tuesday, 25 April 2006 06:09

Gibbard and guitarist/keyboardist Christopher Walla freely traded back and forth on guitar and keyboard duties, using a dual-guitar attack on the more rocking moments like “Crooked Teeth” (dedicated by Gibbard to local scenester Beatle Bob).

See photos of DCFC at this show HERE 

See photos of the Cribs HERE 

 

 

The Cribs photo by Todd Owyoung

The Pageant | St. Louis

Having seen Death Cab for Cutie on the tours for their last two albums, I had concluded there was only one word to adequately describe the band’s stage show: boring. Not that they didn’t try, but with a neverending stream of slow, sad songs, the set would blend into a pleasant but melancholy mush.

No longer. Having signed to Atlantic and unleashed a solid major label debut in Plans,

DCFC have stepped up their game in a major fashion. Their night at The Pageant was an emotional rollercoaster ride, the expertly constructed setlist skillfully sliding from pensive ballads to powerful, full-on rock moments through excellent use of the band’s many slow-building songs that begin with a murmur and end with a cascade of churning guitar washes and cymbal crashes.

The concert kicked off with Plans’ slow-burning lead track “Marching Bands of Manhattan,” leading perfectly into the orgiastic explosion of “The New Year.” Singer Benjamin Gibbard rocked back and forth in front of his mic as the stage lights flashed around him, but the song’s true power came from Nick Harmer, whose thunderous bass—often buried in the mix on record—came to the forefront and pushed the songs into a whole other territory.

The setlist was scientific in its precision, giving time to older material while still concentrating heavily on the more recent with one, two, and three songs from their first, second, and third albums respectively, plus a half dozen tunes apiece from Plans and 2003’s breakthrough Transatlanticism. Gibbard and guitarist/keyboardist Christopher Walla freely traded back and forth on guitar and keyboard duties, using a dual-guitar attack on the more rocking moments like “Crooked Teeth” (dedicated by Gibbard to local scenester Beatle Bob), while using keys to accentuate the spacier “Different Names for the Same Thing,” which caused a massive clap-along that shook the Pageant’s walls.

The band’s tragic romanticism reached its peak with the back-to-back “Styrofoam Plates” (a savagely bitter lament to a deadbeat dad given a delicate, majestic performance) and “What Sarah Said” (a ballad that reaches Cure levels of morose-ness with its hook “Who’s gonna watch you die?”). Gibbard, in response to the overwhelmingly sad atmosphere his band had constructed, joked, “Here’s a dance tune for you” as the band launched into “Soul Meets Body,” the giddily upbeat first single from Plans. The crowd, standing stock-still up to this point, finally stirred into a mass of flailing arms and shouted-out lyrics as the song moved at a gallop on bouncing bass and acoustic guitar.

As the main set lumbered toward its conclusion, the band broke out all the stops on “We Looked Like Giants,” Walla and Harmer trading duties back and forth while Gibbard thundered on a mini-drumkit to accentuate Jason McGerr’s already brutal percussion. The effervescent “The Sound of Settling” closed the main set so effectively that even if the band never returned for an encore, the audience likely wouldn’t have complained.

This, of course, didn’t happen. Massive applause greeted Gibbard as he returned to the stage for the precious love song “I Will Follow You Into the Dark,” accompanied only by his acoustic guitar and the eager crowd’s backing vocals. The tension gradually built through the eight-minute “Transatlanticism,” starting quietly with Gibbard on solo keyboards before eventually exploding—Harmer and McGerr thrashing their instruments with caveman-like fury—bringing the show to an exhausting and very satisfactory end.

While Brit-rockers the Cribs were an odd choice for an opening band, they put on a solid performance. Careening through material from their new album, The New Fellas, the Jarman brothers’ set was endearingly sloppy, with twins guitarist Ryan and bassist Gary trading off on shouted vocals and thrashing younger brother Ross standing on his drumkit’s stool as often as he was sitting on it. Opening with the furious, flailing “Mirror Kissers,” the trio stomped through “Martell” with a Rancid-like swagger, but it was their final song, “Hey Scenesters!” that proved the band’s catchiest and most memorable.