SONG: "Tiny Vessels" - Death Cab for Cutie (Transatlanticism, 2004)

This song, the undoubted highlight of Death Cab’s magnificent fourth album, is deeply personal to me for reasons I shan’t embellish in gory detail. On a superficial level the listener is able to take what they will from its naked emotional candour. We’ve all been there – lying awake in the dark next to someone and wondering what the hell we’re doing. We’ve all cheated and manipulated another person’s emotions at the expense of our own. We’ve all had our hearts broken, and then gone and done the exact same thing to someone else.


Tiny Vessels almost didn’t make it onto Transatlanticism; Benjamin Gibbard’s bandmates initially questioned the validity of the exercise and tried to warn him away from releasing it at all. As an act of catharsis, the song is callous, cruel and utterly devoid of human feeling. However, their frontman was adamant that it should stay, and he was right: just because the things he’s saying are appalling or reprehensible, that doesn’t make them any less true. The impulse still exists - denial leads to nothing more than a viral infestation of its seed. Painful though its articulation may be, there is no other way: it simply has to be said.


Tiny Vessels is a kind of void; it haunts you with a soullessness that is difficult to place. It’s there in the way Chris Walla’s guitar lines continue spiralling aimlessly once the turmoil has subsided, and the way its final bars fracture into a thousand pieces before fading to a ghostly echo. The whole recording hums with an eerie sense of disquiet that’s impossible to shake. As with all the most challenging art, it’s uncomfortable and uncompromising, but always true to itself. That the song manages to retain a sense of dignity and compassion in the face of such atrocity is testament to its author’s refinement of language and phrasing - ultimately its vicious prose becomes an apology of sorts: an admission of wrong-doing for a hurt that can never be erased. However, for better or worse, by committing his feelings to tape the singer at least had the conviction to see events through to their bitter conclusion.


Richly orchestrated yet devastatingly sparse, Gibbard’s despondency is tangible throughout; though he knows that time will heal the wounds and repair the damage he has caused, at this moment Tiny Vessels was the only available outlet for his grief. And by virtue of his confession, he is redeemed.