E-Mail This Article to a Friend The strange new face of indie Death Cab for Cutie and Sufjan Stevens BY MATT ASHARE
	Related Links   Death Cab for Cutie's official Web site Michael Alan Goldberg talks politics with frontman Ben Gibbard.

Seth Cohen is a lovable loser with a wry sense of humor, an unrequited crush on a girl named Summer, and a key role in the Fox teen soap The OC as the awkward underdog. It’s a familiar archetype with a twist: much care has gone into selecting Seth’s passions, which, along with Summer, include cool comic books and some hip indie-rock bands. Indeed, The OC has created a lucrative offshoot of "soundtrack" compilations culled in large part from Seth’s record collection. The first helped boost Spoon’s profile and set the tone for what was to come — smart, tasteful, confessional pop songs from cult artists accessible enough for prime time yet edgy enough to distinguish Cohen from Britney-loving/Bizkit-rockin’ mallrats. Music from the OC Mix 2, 3, and 4 brought Eels, Jimmy Eat World, Matt Pond PA, and Modest Mouse to the low-key, hip-hop(e)less party, and The OC found itself at the center of a cultural zeitgeist— a new indie renaissance populated by artists less hostile to corporate America then was the post-Nirvana underground of the ’90s.

Seth’s favorite band is Death Cab for Cutie, a polite Seattle foursome who’d been quietly accumulating fans and releasing albums full of restrained, atmospheric, guitar-driven anthems with yearning poetic lyrics on the tiny Barsuk label for six years before "A Lack of Color" ended up on last year’s Music from the OC Mix 2 (Warner Bros.). It was a banner year for Death Cab. Sensitive frontman Ben Gibbard scored a surprise 2003 hit with his synth-pop side project the Postal Service, whetting appetites for the next DCFC album, 2004’s Transatlanticism, just as the band were being written into The OC’s plot. As filmmaker Justin Mitchell chronicles in Drive Well, Sleep Carefully (Plexifilm), a film documenting the final leg of the Transatlanticism tour, after years in a van, DCFC were traveling in style, albeit with apologies. "We weren’t sure how people were going to react to a big behemoth tour bus," Gibbard worries, echoing the fears of every indie band who achieve commercial success.

Club tours give way to sold-out two-night stands at larger theaters like San Francisco’s Fillmore West. By the end of the film, which begins by warning, "This is not the story of underground versus mainstream . . . of indie labels versus majors," the success of Transatlanticism leads to a deal with Atlantic. Take out the versus and it really is a story about indies and majors, the underground and the mainstream. But Death Cab for Cutie represent the new face of indie rock — an artless, trusting, less self-consciously defiant profile. "We put the punk in punctual," Gibbard recalls a band member’s remarking in Drive Well, and one wonders whether he’s aware that "punctual" is the backhanded compliment Rob Reiner’s Marty DiBergi gives Spinal Tap at the start of that film.

When Kurt Cobain killed himself, Gibbard and Chris Walla — the guitarist/keyboardist/producer he started DCFC with in Bellingham, Washington, before they moved to Seattle and hooked up with bassist Nicholas Harmer and drummer Jason McGerr — were just teenagers. They absorbed Nirvana’s mythology: until recently, they owned and recorded in the same run-down studio where Bleach was made; there are distant echoes of Kurt’s discordant guitars and tangled emotions in a typical DCFC song; and they possess a certain awkward, unglamorous self-awareness. Yet they’re remarkably well adjusted. Gibbard may strain to sing about a world collapsing in around him, but he’s the first to admit he had "a stable upbringing." He apologizes to an LA audience after an impassioned "Why You’d Want To Live Here." ("I really hope you guys don’t take that song personally.") And the thing about the eagerly awaited new Plans (Atlantic) is how little impact the events of the past two years have had on the band.

Kalefah Sanneh in last Sunday’s New York Times likened Gibbard to an American Chris Martin and DCFC to Coldplay. Recommending Death Cab to Coldplay fans makes sense — both occupy similar sonic spectrums, a kind of melancholy, soft-focus midrange that blurs everything from piano chords and jangling guitars to steady backbeats into a plaintive balladry. And like Martin, Gibbard wants to share his pain without intruding too much. But he lacks Martin’s soft touch. He’s prone to clunky poetics like "In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule/I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black" ("I Will Follow You into the Dark"). And instead of boiling his emotions down to a universal essence, he sets most of his songs in a particular time ("Summer Skin") and place ("Marching Bands of Manhattan"). Reassuring sentiments like "Someday you will be loved" are rarely repeated. Gibbard’s linear songs offer evocative snapshots of fleeting feelings, poignant recollections, and vaguely hopeful sentiments suffused in sadness. "And all you see is where else you could be when you’re at home/And out on the street are so many possibilities to not be alone," he croons against little more than a vapor trail of reverbed guitar and piano notes buoyed by strummed acoustic.

"This is a nightmare — I’m sweating to death, driving 10 miles an hour on, like, a rickshaw, listening to this . . . music," is Summer’s reaction to a lovelorn Seth’s choice of tunes in one OC episode. "Hey, do not insult Death Cab," Seth warns. "It’s like one guitar and a whole lot of complaining," she remarks. She’s right. But so is Seth.

Like Ben Gibbard, Sufjan Stevens is a poetic singer-songwriter fond of recalling specific events and evoking specific settings. But for him it’s no literary device. The Brooklyn-based Stevens, who records under his own name with everything from banjos and acoustic guitars to choirs and string quartets for the Wyoming-based indie Asthmatic Kitty, uses geography in particular as a means to corral the herds of words that flow freely from pen to paper. The new Illinois (full title is Sufjan Stevens Invites You To: Come On Feel the Illinois) is his second state-ment; 2003’s Michigan, or Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State, was the first. But that doesn’t keep his pen from wandering off to Savannah, the Palisades, Jacksonville, and even NYC, as he plays with history, poetry, iconography, and just about anything else that catches his mind’s eye, from Carl Sandburg visiting in a dream (to ask, "Are you writing from the heart?") to a brother whose red hat he wears on what might be a cross-country trip.

Illinois is a strangely quiet album, punctuated by instrumental passages and driven by Stevens’s all-consuming desire to evoke an America both familiar and foreboding. "John Wayne Gacy, Jr.," an oddly touching acoustic ode to the notorious serial killer, is fingerpicked folk reminiscent of Elliott Smith’s early recordings. Stevens’s full-voiced whisper is very Smith-like, as is his multi-instrumental facility (he plays banjo, guitar, drums, bass, piano, etc.). Bursts of trumpet, flowing string arrangements, and the complex harmonies of the "Illinoisemaker Choir" dot the orchestral landscape of "Jacksonville," as Stevens looks to Andrew Jackson for guidance. Against the plucked banjo backdrop of "Decatur," he has fun rhyming "Stephen A. Douglas was a great debater" with "Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator."

It’s hard to find a "rock-and-roll poet" whose words hold up when stripped of hooks and melodies. But the eccentric Stevens matches his adventurous musical spirit with a poet’s ear for the musicality of language. The OC’s producers made room for him on Seth Cohen’s virtual iPod — Mix 4 (Warner Bros.) includes "To Be Alone with You" — and suddenly he’s selling out rooms as big as the Somerville Theatre (where he plays next Thursday). But just as Coldplay fans may find solace in Gibbard’s lonely musings, Death Cab’s core audience are being primed for the challenge Stevens offers. Think of Illinois as the kind of album Seth Cohen will be forcing on Summer when he returns from a semester at NYU.

Sufjan Stevens | Somerville Theatre, 55 Davis Square | September 8 |SOLD OUT

DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE | Orpheum Theatre, 1 Hamilton Place, Boston | October 17 | 617.931.2000