A Probably More Epic than Necessary Group Review of the New Death Cab Album (Part II)

It seems like it was just yesterday that we here at Bollocks! were spending more time thinking about Death Cab for Cutie’s Codes and Keys than we were spending working on our actual jobs. Fortunately, none of our bosses read Bollocks!. Right?

Anyway, the reason I decided to spread this review out over two days (much like one might spread their favorite peanut butter on a piece of toast) was so I could share more of the survey answers that we came up with in trying to assess the worth of this here new Death Cab for Cutie album. You might recall that Justin’s survey answers were by far the most negative but, as he mentioned in an email, “Somebody has to be the bad guy, right?” Right, Justin. If I’ve learned anything in three years of doing Bollocks! it’s this: if you write your honest, unfiltered opinion on the internet long enough, eventually some fanboys will find you. And they will hate you. My advice to my two newest collaborators, no strangers to the vagaries of the internet themselves, is to let the hatred of the fanboys be as a sauce that you dribble over a particularly enticing mountain of mashed potatoes; let it feed you and fill you with calories that you will then burn writing your honest opinion of other things.

That’s enough of the fatherly advice. Let’s get back to our survey about Codes and Keys. It was harder than I’d like to admit coming up with questions that I thought might yield hilarious results, but one question I’m very proud to have put on the survey was “What kind of people do you think would have sex to Codes and Keys and what sort of sex do you imagine they’d have (i.e., ‘satisfactory,’ ‘unsatisfactory,’ ‘five minute missionary for purposes of reproduction only,’ ‘a parade’s worth of rusty trombones,’ etc.)?” The thing that I find very telling about the answers to this question is that, even for the two of us who liked the album, our answers pointed to either not very exciting sex or to sex where the music becomes irrelevant.  Consider Zac’s answer and remember that he likes Codes and Keys the most out of all of us: “Things would be ridin’ along fine for about eight minutes, and then ‘Some Boys’ would kick in, and the couple would share an awkward laugh and try not to look at each other. The kind of couple that can salvage this moment is not the couple that is copulating to Codes and Keys. They turn away from each other and go to sleep.”

Justin’s answer is strongly indicative of his dim view of the record, but quite entertaining nonetheless: “The people who have sex to Codes and Keys are the same people who, five or six years ago, would have been downtown at a show or a bar instead of in bed at 9:30 on a Friday night having sex to alternative pop music. They are the type of people who primarily do it missionary style out of habit but when she arrhythmically rides him cowgirl style it rocks both their worlds and they feel like pornstars.”

Perhaps it was Justin’s depressing answer that led me to post the following disclaimer to my own response: “I’m not suggesting that I would fuck to this album. I’m not going to tell you what music to fuck to unless you’ve never fucked while Sam Cooke, My Morning Jacket, the Flaming Lips, or Curtis Mayfield were playing.”

As soon as I thought about Codes and Keys and fucking, I came up with a question about the kind of date a person might have with this album. Zac chose not to answer this question and I choose to believe it’s because of the graphic nature of his imagined evening with Codes and Keys. Justin’s answer was pretty depressing: “Codes and Keys comes over to my place, cooks me some soggy eggplant parmesan, and we finish off the night with some over-the-clothes groping on the couch while Num3ers plays on TV.”

I said Codes and Keys “painstakingly calls all of my friends to find out my likes and dislikes and then it shows up promptly at the appointed date time, wearing not too much cologne. We go to my favorite restaurant where I am greeted by a pint of my favorite ale. Afterwards, we go to a show at a non-Ticketmaster venue, probably the Troubadour in Santa Monica. If anything, I think Codes and Keys is trying a little too hard. But it’s charming. So I give it a quick kiss goodnight and try to decide if  I’m ready to settle down with it or if I want to fuck around with the bad boys for a few more years.”

In Fight Club (if I’m reading the current trends correctly, Fight Club is due for a gritty reboot ’round about next summer. It will probably feature Zac Efron cornholing himself with a 9mm), Brad Pitt’s character says, “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” So I put that question to my survey-taking staff – has Codes and Keys ever even been in a fight and if so, did it win? Justin saw the album in dubious battle with a somewhat surprising foe: “Codes and Keys was once in a fight with its Home Owner’s Association over the height of the Wisteria bush in his front yard. There was some confusion as to whether the article governing the height of shrubs referred to the branches or the average bulk of the shrub’s trunk. Codes and Keys was seen the following Saturday morning up on a ladder with pruning shears and a pair of paisley gardening gloves.”

Zac, still wounded from an encountered with Owl City, imagined a mild-mannered tag team of Ben Gibbard bands against OC’s singer: “I heard Codes and Keys went over to Give Up‘s house and they got pretty trashed and set fire to Adam Young’s car, but then they apologized later on his Facebook page.”

I put a northwest spin on my answer: “I heard Codes and Keys punched a dude for shoving its girlfriend at a Sleater-Kinney show back in 2003. But Codes and Keys mostly fucked up its hand and felt really bad afterwards.”

I wish there were time, dear Bollocks! readers, to share with you each survey in its entirety, but three days of Death Cab for Cutie coverage would be too much. I do, however, want to share with you my favorite answers submitted by Zac and Justin. I suggested creating a tortured analogy between Codes and Keys and a film, book, or et cetera. And Justin’s answer paints a vivid picture of how he sees the record: “The analogy I’m basing this on is a film that doesn’t exist, and shoud not exist. High Fidelity 2. Imagine if there were a second film that picked up a few months after the closing of High Fidelity. Rob and Laura really do make it and Rob overcomes his destructive pattern of always looking for the next potential relationship with every cute girl who flirts with him. He mellows out, he gets happy, he invests in Laura and their future. Maybe he sells off Championship Vinyl to Dick and Barry and moves to the suburbs. Rob and Laura live happily ever after. Good for Rob, bad for us. Who would watch that? That sounds horrible!

“Well, that’s exactly what happened to DCFC. The band settled down with a major label, Gibbard settled down with Zooey and they’re done chasing the dream. It’s good for them as people but the story the band has been trying to tell suffers. Just as Rob Gordon was best as the tragically misguided but well-meaning chump who resonated with thousands of hopelesssly unsettled single guys everywhere, so was Death Cab the band that you’d put on after getting dumped or when your current relationship was on the rocks and you could find comfort in knowing that Ben Gibbard was right there with you, pushing through the jungle of hit-and-miss dating and dead end relationships.

“What’s found on Codes and Keys is the aftermath of getting what you’ve been pining for all along: comfort and security. You get to stop trying so hard and let yourself go a little bit. Codes and Keys is the musical equivalent of making a movie about Rob and Laura picking out what color of paint to use in the kitchen and coming to an agreement without any argument.”

Now bear in mind, that’s just one man’s opinion of Codes and Keys.  Compare that with my favorite answer from Zac. When asked what the nicest thing was that he could honestly say about the album, Zac replied simply (and elegantly), “Ben Gibbard’s voice is like an aural rim-job.”

My favorite answer of my own is only being included here because it kinda sums up how I’ve felt about Death Cab for Cutie as a band for quite some time. To the question of what sort of alcoholic beverage Codes and Keys would be and why, I wrote that it would be, “A vodka-cran… it’s pretty, but stronger than it looks and someone will undoubtedly call you a fag for liking it.”

So there you have it, folks. Two days spent dissecting Codes and Keys in no really organized fashion. If our approach was hamhazard, I hope it was at least entertaining. Since I’m the editor here and usually get to have the last word, I’m gonna say that we’ve all learned a valuable lesson here this week. We’ve learned that it’s okay to have disagreements about music, especially if they’re funny disagreements and we’ve also learned that Zac likes having his asshole tickled by song.

A Probably More Epic than Necessary Group Review of the New Death Cab Album (Part I)

A good thing that has happened at Bollocks! HQ this summer is that we’ve been able to add two new contributors, both of whom are slightly more tangible than many of their cohorts. The sad thing is that, though we’re the three most provably extant contributors to Bollocks!, we all live in different cities at the moment. This sad (and temporary) fact means that a lot of our verbal sparring about music has to be done via email and – sometimes – in lieu of actual productive work.

To keep us all informed as to the weekly goings on at Bollocks!, I send the contributors an email (when I remember to) that roughly outlines what content is planned to appear on what day. I do this so that they have an opportunity to tell me, “Hey, I’ve got a review of such and such done” and then we can put it on the docket. Anyway, this week, I mentioned that I would do a review of Death Cab for Cutie’s Codes and Keys if nobody else wanted to. This prompted Justin to ask what approach I was going to take toward Codes and Keys because he wanted to set upon it with all violence. At that point, I hadn’t listened to the album enough to be sure of my feelings, but I mentioned liking what I heard so far. So then Zac chimed in with, “I was lukewarm on the new Death Cab album, but now I fucking love it.” He then proposed a three-way slap-fight/review of Codes and Keys.

And that’s when the fun started.

For some reason, late Monday night, I’d started coming up with a dumb email survey (like the ones you used to get every three hours back in 1999) about Codes and Keys and, early yesterday morning, I sent it to Zac and Justin. They seemed amenable to the idea (“Sweet Jesus, yes,” wrote Justin) and so the email thread spiraled on out of control, including a detour into several un-get-back-able minutes listening to Owl City, a band which Justin has masochistically been listening to “because I am going to review the sugary shit out of this record” (I think, if you want to try to typecast Justin, Zac, and myself, you have to consider Justin the almost recklessly brave one. The dude will listen to damn near anything with very little concern for his own sanity).

I’ll get to the survey “results” (the word has never been used more loosely), by which you may not find an opinion in line with your own but you will find plenty o’ laughs, in a minute. First, I’d like to recap the email battle royale that commenced between Justin and Zac (who has yet to make an official Bollocks! debut – he’s cooking up something special for Great Fucking Albums, and he’ll have it finished before the next Guns ‘n’ Roses album comes out). Justin was the first to get his survey done and, upon reading it, Zac declared it “hamhazardly wrong.” That’s not a typo: “Hamhazardly” is, according to Plan Z, “A portmanteau (or word-centaur, as I prefer) of Ham-fisted and Haphazard! It’ll be in Wikipedia by the end of the decade, but I like to beat the rush on this shit.”

Zac sensed from Justin’s survey an accusation that, “ Mr. Gibbard’s purported domestic bliss has savaged his creativity.” Zac disagreed with his characteristic diplomacy: “I say that’s a bunch of fucking nonsense.”

That debate is better hashed out in the surveys but there was also a difference between the two in what they find important in a song. For Zac, it’s the lyrics, which is why, “I supply heady and questionable sacrifices to the altar of The Hold Steady, and am bored to fuck by nearly all instrumental jazz.” For Justin, “ The lyrics here just don’t move me as much without the right musical framework, which to me is 80% of what will make a song resonate with me.” If you want my two cents, I probably tend to lean a little heavier on lyrics, but it’s hard to say what will move me. The lyrics to Ramones songs are largely fucking stupid, but I love the Ramones with all my heart.

But now to these here surveys: I wrote out a bunch of questions and not all of us answered all of them, but that’s okay. I’m not gonna reprint all of my answers where others will do, but I do want to provide examples from all three of us so that you can get the full spectrum of our feelings for this record.

The first question on the survey yielded some hilarious answers. I asked us to imagine that Codes and Keys was a food; what food would it be, and why? Justin’s answer is very revealing of his overall attitude toward the album: “Oatmeal, or Bran Cereal. Because now that Ben Gibbard has lost his edge, this is what his wife serves him for breakfast to keep him regular and help prevent heart disease. Also, like oatmeal, the music on the album has a base ingredient that can and has been used for so much more, but in this meal it’s simply mixed with 1/3 cup of water, microwaved for 2-3 minutes, and served.”

Zac was a little more abstract in his answer: “Once there was a peacock, raised from birth by a little girl named Esther. Esther and the peacock were inseparable;  where one went, the other was sure to follow. One day, Esther contracted polio while drinking from a garden hose. A few weeks later, the virus had entered her blood stream and proceeded to viciously savage her central nervous system. While Esther was in the hospital, the peacock stood a silent vigil outside her window, and refused to eat. Esther died, and the peacock soon followed, succumbing to loneliness and starvation. If you ate that peacock, it’d be like Codes and Keys, because it’s very pretty and sad, and possesses a tragic hope, but is perhaps not as substantive as it might have been.”

My answer to the food question is gonna seem downright prosaic after that, but I said that Codes and Keys would be, “A strawberry fucking milkshake, probably from Burgerville [if you do not live in Oregon or southwest Washington, you do not know what Burgerville is, but that's not my problem]. Some people are gonna get sick about half way through and some people are gonna eat that shit with a spoon and then lick the remaining bits out of the cup. And some people are gonna be all, “A strawberry milkshake? Bo-ring. I’m going to Jamba Juice!”

As this review is already trending longish, I’m going to expand it to two parts so that you can see for yourselves exactly how much time the three of us spent thinking about Death Cab for Cutie yesterday. I’ll end Part One by introducing you a little more to my friend Zac. During the email conversation about Death Cab for Cutie, Justin sent us links to some Owl City songs and, after hearing one, Zac simply wrote back, “That song makes me want to hunt and kill people for sport.”

It’s gonna be an awesome summer here at Bollocks!. Part Two of our Death Cab review will be up tomorrow. Look forward to it the way a person stuck on Disneyland’s Small World ride looks forward to the sweet release of death.