Everything about the differences in lighting and wardrobe pointed towards Give Up being the big payoff-the tasteful floor lighting Death Cab (dressed in all-black) received gave way to glittering and shifting LED pillars that surrounded the white linen-clad Postal Service, who at times looked like either The Polyphonic Spree (at best) or a cult (at worst). Though many other tours would have seen Gibbard’s bands flip-flopping position each night, trading off on de facto headliner duties, there’s a refreshing honesty to the fact that The Postal Service was the ultimate event. It’s one thing for the full band that is Death Cab for Cutie to have knocked out some juicy sonic magic like Transatlanticism, but Give Up allowed everyone who listened to it to imagine that they, alone in their own apartment, with the help of a friend in another state, could create something able to withstand the years better than many of the things that have come and gone in the Emerald City since 2003. Arena shows have to overcome a lot in order to feel like they connect on an emotional level, but for anyone who grew up or lived within a 50 mile radius of the former KeyArena, the entire evening’s worth of performances-especially the Postal Service-felt incredibly triumphant. When he sung “ And you may case the grounds/ From the Cascades to Puget Sound,” the thousands and thousands of ticket holders in the audience roared in the way that only people sitting a mile from Puget Sound could. “I wrote these songs in a cabin apartment up on Mercer and Belmont,” reflected Gibbard, gobsmacked that he was now performing them in the former home of his Seattle SuperSonics, the Space Needle towering above us a quarter-mile away. Though there are more dates coming after their first of two sold-out performances at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena, there on the eve of Transatlanticism’s actual 20th anniversary, things felt really special. Some bands perform these shows to pay tribute to albums that didn’t quite get their due, but here, Gibbard and his associates paid tribute to the unfathomable amount of love and adoration that poured out of the audiences who listened to these 20 songs at sold-out show after sold-out show. How do you talk about 20-year-old music without being firmly aware of the fact that it soundtracked the young lives of just about every single person at each of their sold-out/jam-packed arena dates? Even deeper than that, these shows allow listeners a chance to take a time machine back to when these bands were at their most powerful this was the heyday of Ben Gibbard, the front man of both bands, who seemingly wrung himself dry 20 years ago to capture these two records. The mere fact that these two bands are on tour in 2023 performing their respective landmark albums from 2003- Transatlanticism and Give Up-means that nostalgia was always gonna be part of the equation. It would be impossible to talk about the music of Death Cab for Cutie or the Postal Service without talking about nostalgia.
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