#471 The Best Album of 2001, Round 1 Match #40: Death Cab for Cutie vs. Sloan
Hey folks!
Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:
#47 Death Cab for Cutie, THE PHOTO ALBUM
vs.
#82 Sloan, PRETTY TOGETHER
To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [kentmbeeson@hey.com] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.
We have dueling Designated Cheerleaders today! First up, for THE PHOTO ALBUM, it’s @robbiebuffalo.bsky.social. Take it away, Robbie!
Describing an album as "transitional" can't help but feel dismissive. After all, if the album was a major statement or a classic work, we'd refer to it that way, even if it was the only time the artist sounded like that. But often transitional albums are the most interesting to revisit years later. It's likely you've spent less time with them than the later, definitive works. And only looking back does a lot of what the artist was doing fall into place. That's how I feel about THE PHOTO ALBUM by Death Cab for Cutie.
Death Cab for Cutie's breakthrough was their 4th album, 2003's TRANSATLANTICISM. Their first 2 albums saw them searching for their voice, with SOMETHING ABOUT AIRPLANES emulating Pacific Northwest indie rockers like Built to Spill and 764-Hero, while WE HAVE THE FACTS AND ARE VOTING YES looked to slowcore bands such as Low and Codeine. You can still hear those influences on THE PHOTO ALBUM, but you also hear the seeds of what the band become and is now known for.
The best examples of this come early in the album. "A Movie Script Ending" begins with twinkling guitars during the verses before building to a louder chorus with singer Ben Gibbard's extra emotive lyrics. "We Laugh Indoors" takes this even further, sounding introspective early on before exploding with a bridge and instrumental breakdown in the middle of the song. If you're only familiar with the band's later songs these will sound like a rougher blueprint, a little less polished, a little less poppy. Album closer "Debate Exposes Doubt" feels like a dry run for TRANSATLANTICISM's closer "A Lack of Color." It's a plaintive, melancholy ballad ruminating on the end of a relationship, looking for closure within, but also giving the album that feeling as well.
Elsewhere though Gibbard is still filtering his songwriting through other influences, whether it's 90s power pop like Fountains of Wayne ("I Was A Kaleidoscope") or Elliott Smith style balladry ("Information Travels Faster"). "Styrofoam Plates" is a slow building character study where Gibbard's narrator bitterly recounts his experience with his absent father. The narrator eventually finds catharsis, which the band echoes through its closing chorus. It's not really a style he ever returned to, but it's an interesting song within their catalog. The highlight of the album for me is "Why You'd Want to Live Here", an upbeat rocker where again our narrator dumps on Los Angeles, though clearly the city is just a place for him to lay his frustration over an unhappy relationship.
THE PHOTO ALBUM is an apt name for a record that doesn't necessarily hang together cohesively, but feels like flipping through a scrapbook. Each song helps you dive into a time and place. It might not represent who you became, but it shows how you got to where you ended up. I still find it to be a great place to visit.
Thank you, Robbie!
Next up, for PRETTY TOGETHER, it’s @atcl.bsky.social. All The City Lights, you’re up!
In the summer of 2002, I was fresh out of college and working as an entertainment reporter in a smallish city on the U.S.-Canadian border. On the Canadian side was a larger smallish city—large enough that for the last few summers it had been able to support a music festival. It had grown each year, but in 2002 it made a leap and booked a who’s who of Canadian rock heavyweights: The Guess Who! Nickelback! The freakin’ Tragically Hip! This, the organizers explained to me, was the Canadian equivalent of U2 coming to town.
“Would they do an advance interview for our entertainment section?” I asked.
“Well ... we can put you in touch with Sloan’s people. I bet Sloan would talk to you.”
Sloan? Who was Sloan?
When you grow up near the border, Canadian music looms large in your media diet. The alt-rock stations everybody listened to in high school were mostly Canadian and, with while they were evidently not held to the normal Canadian Content standards, they still played a lot of The Hip, Our Lady Peace, and Barenaked Ladies (long before “One Week”). Not Sloan, though, it would seem. Or if they did, I didn’t take notice.
Sloan’s people did, in fact, return my call. They scheduled a phone interview with Chris Murphy and sent me a copy of the CD that the band was still touring on. It arrived, drenched in sunset hues, and I popped it into the ol’ Discman not knowing what to expect. The drums-and-crowd loop came exploding out of my speakers, followed by a monster riff. I was suddenly excited about talking to Murphy. It seems that I had landed an interview with a real band that made music for people who know what rock ’n’ roll is about.
Murphy was gracious and charming. It didn’t take me long to figure out that those interviews are somewhat rare. Most times you end up talking to someone who is tired of answering the same damn questions and doesn’t understand why their publicist is making them talk to a random small-town reporter. But every once in a while you get someone on the line who just loves music and is happy to talk about it with anyone who shares that love. Murphy was like that.
Sloan, I learned, is made up of guys who have been friends since high school and college in Halifax, with a shared love of ‘60s and ‘70s songcraft. They all write songs. They all take turns on lead vocals. That means that while Murphy mostly plays bass, on some songs he has to get behind the drum kit. They are nothing if not versatile.
When you have a band with multiple talented songwriters, you might end up with a cohesive vision approached from intriguingly different perspectives (see Drive-By Truckers), or you might end up with a thrilling mess in which each of them thinks they’re making a completely different album (see Fleetwood Mac). PRETTY TOGETHER is … not TUSK, but it is a bit disjointed. The conventional wisdom is that this album stands out in the Sloan discography because Murphy contributed a bunch of sad ballads, but he also wrote “Pick it Up and Dial It,” which is one of the only tracks in the same arena-rock league as guitarist Patrick Pentland’s thrilling opening track.
For the last 20-odd years, I’ve really only listened to a handful of songs from PRETTY TOGETHER, but I’ve listened to them a lot. That publicity copy of PRETTY TOGETHER still sits on my shelf, though, and I hauled it out and listened to it in its entirety for the first time in a long time in preparation for today’s match. Don’t get me wrong, I like this album, but I don’t think it’s quite strong enough to overcome this electorate’s demonstrated antipathy toward well-crafted guitar pop (see Pernice Brothers). Sloan has the advantage of going up against a band with an annoying name and a not-insurmountable seed differential. My big ask for anybody who feels like calling it quits after “If It Feels Good Do It” is to make sure you at least give a listen to the Murphy-penned “I Love a Long Goodbye.” It is a gorgeous piece of yearning, major-minor, sad-ballad songcraft.
Thank you, ATCL!
Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.
Yesterday, #18 Stephen Malkmus, STEPHEN MALKMUS defeated #111 Kaija Saariaho & Esa-Pekka Salonen, SAARIAHO: GRAAL THÉÂTRE, CHÂTEAU DE L'ÂME & AMERS, 111-49.
Thanks,
Kent
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