Release Date: October 16th, 2012
His obsession with Jack Kerouac probably beats this drum most clearly, but Ben(jamin) Gibbard is special to a very tight subset of people – collegiate millenials more willing to download Third Eye Blind than Pavement. He’s a qualitative respite from both vacuous pop and impressionistic, stodgy indie rock. For those people who have followed Gibbard down the rabbit hole, his first solo effort, Former Lives, will feel essential, a window into the creative process of a hero. But for most, the record will appear a clearing house for half-cooked compositions and only slightly engaging storytelling, proving that what made Gibbard’s Death Cab For Cutie work special may have been the other members of the band.
Former Lives seems inevitable now that it exists. Gibbard has toured extensively solo, and has never shied away from doing extra-Cutie projects (The Postal Service chief among those). In a way Gibbard is a bit of a cipher, able to blend his perfunctory storytelling bent into any sort of environment required of him. What makes Former Lives so frustrating, then, is that it feels like Gibbard tries to hard to blend into a wall that isn’t there. Half a dozen of the tracks here hit a sort of immediate aural indie-rock pleasure center, then fail to go anywhere notable with that framework. Individually, songs like “Dream Song,” “Teardrop Windows,” “Lily” or “Lady Adelaide” play as weightless mixtape fodder, something mid-tempo to stick between the real stars as palette cleanser. It’s a problem, then, that Former Lives has no real standout tracks, and ends up flailing when it tries to innovate.
Gibbard insists that the tracks from Former Lives are culled from many years of tossed off Death Cab ideas and original compositions Gibbard felt would be more appropriate as his work. Indeed, many of the songs can be directly tied back to former iterations of the seminal Seattle indie-rock band. “Bigger Than Love,” one of the better songs on the record, feels ripped from Narrow Stairs-era Cutie, while the excruciatingly cloy “Something’s Rattling (Cowpoke)” recalls the worst parts of Gibbard’s somewhat misguided collaboration with Jay Farrar for the soundtrack One Fast Move Or I’m Gone. It’s not as if the songs aren’t reinvented for Gibbard’s current sensibilities; it’s only that those sensibilities are relatively boring.
Part of this could be due to Gibbard’s narratives, as well. Never an overly passionate or emotive songwriter, Gibbard’s voice seems to have deteriorated with the passage of time. Former Lives feels like it wants to be close to the listener, drawing you in with it’s tales of love and loss. Yet the closest we ever get to a concrete, sincere feeling is Gibbard’s pretty little line in “Oh Woe,” “It’s been a basement of a year.” Gibbard may not want to directly evoke his broken hearts (of which he insists there are three on Former Lives), but everything else here seems so awkwardly distant that it’s tough to get a handle on exactly what the listener is supposed to be feeling.
The best song of the group, “Duncan, Where Have You Gone?” illustrates the problem of Former Lives most clearly. Adequately over-produced, with vocals swirling across a traditional Gibbard tale of loss, “Duncan” is a sonic outlier from the rest of Former Lives, a possible reason for why the song feels like such a breath of fresh air. It feels like the most necessary of any of the tracks here – not necessarily a Death Cab worthy cut, but something a little better than the odds n’ sods that fill the rest of the record. Completists may find something of value in this collection of Gibbard’s collected solo work, but for the most part there’s little here to attract new listeners or former fans disillusioned by the piddling Codes & Keys.
Benjamin Gibbard – Former Lives tracklist:
- “Shepherd’s Bush Lullaby”
- “Dream Song”
- “Teardrop Windows”
- “Bigger Than Love”
- “lily”
- “Something’s Rattling (Cowpoke)”
- “Duncan, Where Have You Gone?”
- “Oh, Woe”
- “Hard One to Know”
- “Lady Adelaide”
- “Broken Yoke in Western Sky”
- “I’m Building a Fire”
