New York, NY: For years, Kyle Travers has been a self-proclaimed indie music afficionado. When he first heard Sonic Youth’s “Bull In the Heather” at 14 years old, he went out and bought every album that they released so that he could passionately exclaim that their previous work, specifically “Daydream Nation”, was “a lot better.”
Kyle was a die-hard Green Day fan for 2 years until they released their chart-topping album “Dookie”. He smashed his records, called Billy Joe Armstrong a sell-out, and never mentioned the band again.
This decade’s band that has caused the music snob grief is Death Cab for Cutie, and rightly so by pretentious indie fanboys’ standards.
“Ben Gibbard is a jerk,” explained Mr. Travers. “Everything was going fine for Death Cab. ‘Transatlanticism’ because the greatest piece of musical composition in the universe. ‘Plans’ was a little disappointing, but still decent. Then that fucking song ‘Meet Me on the Equinox’ showed up in the Twilight series, and Gibbard got his fat, twitchy ass engaged to Zooey Deschanel, and it was all downhill from there.”
When he had finally calmed down from his ranting, Kyle explained a bit more. “Okay, I can’t begrudge Ben a little love. Zooey is hot, no doubt about it. But I have to blame him for Death Cab’s decline.’Plans’ was the beginning of the end. Then there was a huge drop off for me with ‘Narrow Stairs’. I don’t want to say it was the fact that every little teenie bopper Twilight fan started getting into them, but it may be part of it,” stated Mr. Travers. “Then that song ‘No Sunlight’ got on the radio, and enough was enough. It took me until just this week to try to listen to the rest of that shitty album.”
However, with all of the pain the band had caused Kyle, he admits that he plans to give Death Cab for Cutie’s future album, ‘Codes & Keys’, a listen. “I’m not selling out. I still hate them with a passion. But just yesterday I listened to ‘Grapevine Fires’ on YouTube, and it grabbed me,” explained Travers. “I thought, ‘Hey, maybe they’re going to get back to their roots. Maybe they read my countless Amazon.com reviews and forum posts.’ It sounded like a step back to the Death Cab I used to love. I guess we’ll see.”
When trying to find friends to speak on Kyle’s behalf, one person remarked, “That bitch shits all over everything. No wonder he’s a depressing douche.”
Grapevine Fires is off the album ‘Plans’ not Codes and Keys. I think Plans was ‘decent’ as Kyle put it, and I did enjoy Narrow Stairs, but I can’t even listen to Codes and Keys. I started with ‘We have the facts and we’re voting yes’, and that’s still my favorite Death Cab album. I get the humor in this article, don’t get me wrong, but I guess I have a similar point of view as Kyle. And I guess this is the definition of being a ‘hipster’ these days, but I drank PBR and listened to Indie Rock while wearing vintage clothing and Rayban sunglasses a long time before that sort of thing was recognized as a ‘subculture’. We were just doing our thing, doing what we liked while at the time most people were listening to hip hop and didn’t even know who Death Cab for Cutie or Modest Mouse was, and most of the bands I listened to back then have never reached any kind of mainstream success and probably never will. Probably the only part of that which remains with me now is the music. I can afford to wear clothes that are not thrift store bought and I’m too old to look ‘cool’ wearing the sunglasses and the PBR just isn’t as sweet as it once was. Local craft brews is where its at these days. haha.