Review Summary: I'm thinking I should take that volume back up off the shelf and crack its weary spine and read to help remind myself
There's always a hole. Always. Sometimes it is filled, but mostly it is not. Throughout my life I've seen it filled on its own on occasion, by pure chance – part coincidence but it always took more. It took an effort that maybe it's my own fault for not putting it forth enough but when I did all the pieces fell into place. That's not to say that I didn't try to find cheap substitutes. I never knew a god, and have always been harsh skeptic since childhood, but I'm not going to lie and say that the closest I've ever been to one was while holed up in a sweaty room on a cocktail of two dozen tea bags and psychotropics; or that the escapism of a smoke filled apartment isn't at times more appealing a prospect than it sounds. Alcohol always worked well too. To be honest it's working now... kind of. Alright, not all that well at the moment. That being said, the memories of being complete, if only for a moment or a year, are always there as well. They're just just as powerful of a force, proving that regardless of how ***ed up things get, sometimes life works out. Death Cab For Cutie's
Transatlanticism is the sound of those positive memories coming out all at once. The music itself isn't the most complex, but the songwriting etches itself into my memories, dredging up slide shows of the past with every chord. The album itself has become just as much as a constant as the emotions that it plays upon. It's quite remarkable. The drifting piano that backs “The Passenger Seat” is no longer the backdrop to Ben Gibbard's story but is the trigger to a similar story quite some years after where the characters are my own and the scene ever so slightly different, even if the sentiment remains the same. My own hesitations have co-opted “The Sound of Settling” into something that is just as bittersweet. Even something as flippant as the slightly off key buzz of wrong note in the background of “Death of an Interior Decorator” takes on a life of its own, firing synapses for things I had long though I had forgotten. In the end, I don't know what more I could ask from an album. Yet for all of this I don't find it strange, although it probably is. It only proves to me that a piece of art continues to evolve long past the point when its creator put down his tools and considered it finished. It becomes part of a personal narrative that lies within the consumer alone, each meaning different for each set of eyes or ears. No more of a perfect example of this can be found than
Transatlanticism's title track. The ever building swell shakes me to the bone, acting not only as a projector for corresponding memories, but effortlessly transporting me to the exact time and place. With each droning tom hit on the drums leaves fade and fall in the spring time, a frigid rain falls in the summer, and warm breeze blows through winter.
