Something About Airplanes

Something About Airplanes is the debut studio album by American indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie, released August 18, 1998, on Barsuk Records. A tenth-anniversary edition of the album was released November 25, 2008, featuring redesigned artwork, liner notes by Sean Nelson, and a bonus disc including the band's first ever Seattle performance at the Crocodile Cafe in February 1998.

Early recordings of five songs from the album can be found on the You Can Play These Songs with Chords compilation.

Background

Airplanes 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.

Composition

At the time of the album's writing, Gibbard was just coming into his own as a songwriter. He had hoped to pen lyrics he considered "wildly descriptive and very dense and interesting," but later felt its purported profundity reads as nonsensical. Likewise, his singing voice is slightly different than on later recordings, with an adenoidal nasal tone.

"The Face That Launched 1000 Shits" is a cover of an original song by The Revolutionary Hydra, a band that DCFC guitarist Chris Walla and lead singer/guitarist Ben Gibbard belonged to. The song was written by then-bandmate Jay Chilcote. The song’s title is a play on the phrase “The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships”, attributed to Helen of Troy whose supposed unmatched beauty led to the Trojan War (after Paris, Prince of Troy, kidnapped her from Sparta and her husband King Menelaus).

Artwork

Despite the title referring to airplanes, the image on the album cover is of a rowboat. The image is actually seen through a hole in the booklet cover and a sheet of vellum. Like some of the band's 2000 releases, the text is set entirely in lower case.

Reception

An early review of the album from CMJ columnist Glen Sarvady wrote that the album "has the aura of a young band still crafting its own voice, but working fertile ground and already producing some impressive results." Ian Cohen at Pitchfork writes the album "create[s] a sonic blueprint that's subtly innovative [...] Something About Airplanes instead sounds like a private affair, which is one reason it's so treasured amongst diehards." 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."

Track listing

Personnel

Death Cab for Cutie

Ben Gibbard – vocals, guitar, small piano
Nathan Good – drums, mixing
Nick Harmer – bass guitar
Christopher Walla – guitar, organ, electric piano, things, production, mixing

Additional personnel

Abi Hall – vocals on "Line of Best Fit"
Erika Jacobs – writing and cello arrangement on "Bend to Squares" and "The Face That Launched 1000 Shits"

Tony Lash – mastering

Live at the Crocodile Cafe, February 1998

Chuck MacIan Robertson – recording
Sean Nelson – performer on "Sweet and Tender Hooligan"