Death Cab For Cutie – Something About Airplanes (New Vinyl)

NEW LP

New sealed copy. 2014 remastered reissue on 180 gram black vinyl.

Something About Airplanes is the debut studio album by indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie, released August 18, 1998 on Barsuk Records. It was created at the group's rented house off of Ellis Street in Bellingham. It was recorded on a reel-to-reel eight-track recorder. With Walla's bedroom in the attic, the band inserted a microphone through a hole in the floor to the living room where vocals were tracked. Gibbard's writing was primarily influenced by Idaho indie rockers Built to Spill; in an interview with Vice, he noted that Perfect from Now On, the band's 1997 opus, was "the only thing I was listening to at that point." He continued: "There’s some flagrant Built to Spill ripoffs on that record. I was really influenced by Rex and Bedhead and a lot of these slower kinds of bands."

Airplanes was released through Barsuk and Elsinor Records, the label that issued the group's debut cassette, You Can Play These Songs with Chords. They pressed an initial 1,000 copies of Airplanes, which Gibbard found confounding: "We were imagining we were going to be carrying around boxes of our own records for the rest of our lives," he joked.

Morgan Enos at Billboard launched a celebration of the album for its twentieth anniversary in 2018, writing, "if you want to hear [Death Cab's] sound in chrysalis, you can’t do much better than Airplanes. The album embraces a homespun, basement vibe, but the lyrics prove that Gibbard essentially came out as a perceptive, nuanced writer fully-formed — and with a band that could bring his songs to the light." Similarly, KEXP ran a piece in commemoration, with writer Dusty Henry commenting: "Airplanes [is] such a fascinating and thrilling listen in the Death Cab canon. It's not a benchmark for the band to be measured against. It's a mystery covered in other mysteries [... the] murkiest entry in the band’s catalog. A twisted knot of wobbly guitars and banging drums held together by Gibbard's most obtuse poetry."

TRACKLIST:

A1 Bend To Squares
A2 President Of What?
A3 Champagne From A Paper Cup
A4 Your Bruise
A5 Pictures In An Exhibition
B1 Sleep Spent
B2 The Face That Launched 1000 Shits
B3 Amputations
B4 Fake Frowns
B5 Line Of Best Fit