Death Cab For Cutie is one of these bands which has already existed for a long time, but which I have almost ignored, I mean, I have never bought a DCFC album but I have listened to a lot of their songs, and I have never seen them live but I have written about them occasionally. The emo-indie-pop band is about to release a new album, ‘Kintsugi’, after a rather long absence since their last effort, ‘Codes and Keys’, was released in 2011.
But since that time, a lot has happened in Gibbard’s private life and it’s probably not a coincidence if the album is named after a Japanese art which involves fixing broken things without hiding their scars, an obvious metaphor for his broken marriage? This is what Wikipedia says:
‘This can be seen as a rationale for keeping an object around even after it has broken and as a justification of kintsugi itself, highlighting the cracks and repairs as simply an event in the life of an object rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage’.
Sure, let’s pick an intellectual foreign reference to not make things too obvious, but make sure everyone can easily find the ‘hidden’ meaning. Yeah, it’s gonna be about Gibbard’s divorce from Zooey Deschanel!
The concept of the video for ‘Black Sun’ is a bit intriguing, a violent murder/vengeance happens in the streets of Los Angeles, a bleeding guy is chased and hit by a car, but then the scene appears to be the shooting of an action movie. The stunt with the bloody guy hit by the car is re-enacted over and over while the hair of an uninvolved blonde actress is rearranged to perfection and the music briefly soars above the general ambiance. However the video is filmed in slow-motion matching Ben Gibbard’s slow-paced vocals, ‘How could something so fair be so cruel/When this Black Sun revolved around you.’ Were you hit so badly by love Ben? There is always one of the two that suffers more than the other in a relationship and may be I am reading too much in the metaphor.
Kintsugi’, is set to be released on March 31st, and meanwhile Death cab for Cutie will tour all spring-summer-fall long in a city near you:
