Death Cab For Cutie – Brixton Academy, London 19/11/2008

It isn’t called selling out anymore. It’s called ‘Licensing’. Today’s musical climate has taken the excitement and joy out of release date fever. Today’s youth can download, legally or otherwise, what they want, when they want it. The radio is playing things safe. It is the era of the Radio Friendly Unit Shifter. Ticket prices are soaring (it’s the only way the band can make money if you download kids…..you have been warned). In these conditions, TV can be the way to go for many bands- the only way to guarantee exposure and ultimately form a career in an increasingly stale market. Earlier this month Bloc Party suggested, with tongue only slightly in cheek, that they might release a whole album as a series of adverts. Just a few years ago bands would have been called out for choosing this career path. Now its just an accepted part of life for the immaculately dressed box-fresh youth that cram into Brixton Academy for the show tonight. As Orange County lies smoldering thousands of miles away a wave of sensitive youths have descended on South London. The show was moved down from Alexandra Palace-perhaps an indication that Death Cab For Cutie don’t hold quite such a hold on this nations youth as they do in the US.

The nights jollity begins with TLOBF endorsed Scots Frightened Rabbit. Over the past two years I have had a number of encounters with the band and have to admit that they have never really done that much for me. While nothing they did tonight changed that, for the first time I ‘got it’. In the cavernous Brixton Academy Frightened Rabbit’s blend of soaring tonsils, stadium bothering delay and huge drumming seemed to fit. When they get it right, their sound recalls a more rough around the edges take on the epic melodic pop that has become synonymous in my mind with Loney Dear. However, the epic pop sound can frequently go wrong and all too often the balance tips against Frightened Rabbit, and they plunge headlong into the predictable bland territory in which Snow Patrol seem to permanently reside. With such a big sound and a string of support slots at big venues (next up a tour with fellow Scots Biffy Clyro), their confidence is clearly high as they attempt to lead the crowd in a hands-above-the-head clap-a-long. The attempt falls rather flat, and isn’t the only thing which can be accused of being flat in their set. All too often the vocal harmonies they try to create fall woefully short of the mark. If they can sort this out, however, it doesn’t seem to much of a stretch to imagine Frightened Rabbit gracing stages of this size in their own right in the not to distant future. Plus, I can’t help but wish them well after the drummer thanks the audience at the end of the set before telling them all to ‘drink Stella’. Carling Brixton Academy indeed.

When the lights go down again there is a tension hanging in the air. This is it. This is our sensitive youth. The ‘No Logo’ generation. A generation that has seen it’s own subcultures bought off them, repackaged and sold back to them in a more sanitised form at a profit without batting an eyelid. Generation Why? The iGeneration. The O.C. generation. Death Cab For Cutie are their leaders. With a working knowledge of their covers, a smattering of their material on my ipod and a genuine love of one of their side projects I wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer adulation on show as soon as the band hit the stage. This is hero worship of the highest order. Teen screams greet the end of every song and the opening bars of the next. Couples embrace. Someone beside me sheds a tear of disbelief that they managed to get ‘so close’. However it isn’t until ‘The New Year’ that the band really hit their stride, the crowd singing a long at the top of their lungs. The headlong charge of ‘We Laugh Indoors’ is punk rock without the bad attitude- sanitised and melodic. The kind of thing you could take home to your mother (providing that she isn’t a Minor Threat fan or anything, in which case she would probably criticise it for lacking a certain edge.)

Without doubt Death Cab For Cutie do what they do very well indeed. And what they do is college rock writ large; jangly, emotive pop rock with Ben Gibbard’s slightly nasal vocal. They are the latest in the long line of bands with a similar sound; They Might Be Giants without the novelty songs, or Fountains of Wayne prior to their involvement with gross-out comedy. During a lull in the set I overhear a conversation that sums up the evening well. One girl says ‘I sort of feel like I recognise them all’. After a while the songs do rather merge into one, long pleasant noise. While it is hard to fault the performance, it is equally hard to get excited by it.

The night’s one true highlight comes as the rest of the band take a seat leaving frontman Gibbard alone with his acoustic guitar, bathed in light, picking gently through the beautiful ‘I Will Follow You Into The Dark.’ It’s a genuine ‘moment’, though sadly it seems we no longer know how to experience such things. As soon as the opening notes ring out hands rush to pockets and mobile phones, and cameras are held aloft, with the result being that the audience is effectively watching the show through a hundred tiny screens. In our rush to document and share our every move with others, it seems the iGeneration has forgotten how to actually experience things.