YMMV / Death Cab for Cutie

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• Awesome Music: Transatlanticism has very few critics. The title track is a live show staple, and always performed at the end.
  • "Soul Meets Body" is just ridiculously catchy.
  • Plans in general is a very well-made album.
  • Narrow Stairs, while being a great deal darker than their other albums, is very well made with a wonderful EP. Well...let's just say that Death Cab's later work has just been brilliant.
• Covered Up: "The Face that Launched 1000 Shits" off of Something About Airplanes is a cover of a Revolutionary Hydra song. Although, no recordings of the original Hydra song exist; it was generally only played live.
• Ending Fatigue: Depending upon who you ask, the lengthy coda to "Stability" is an example of this.
• Epic Riff: Though they don't play the kind of music where you'd expect to find epic riffs, "Cath..." and "You Are a Tourist" are two solid examples for the guitar, and "I Will Possess Your Heart" and "Summer Skin" are some fairly epic bass riffs.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Their cover of "This Charming Man" never existed. Neither did "Flustered/Hey Tomcat!"
• Friendly Fandoms: With Bastille, as their lead singer, Dan Smith, frequently complimented Death Cab.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • "I Will Possess Your Heart", a song many take as an anthem to continue pursuing an uninterested love interest, is actually just a dark song about a stalker whose affection will likely never be returned. It's possible some ambiguous language used is a commentary on the messages the stalker received from their surrounding culture. Confirmed by Word of God, according to this.
  • The aforementioned "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" is bandied about as the typical love song, and is thrown around as such by people who come across it randomly. Even in professional works, for example, Grey's Anatomy, who used it for an episode title in the brain-tumour-Denny arc, despite the actual existence and knowledge of the afterlife in the show. Scrubs averted it by using it as an exit song for an episode about what happens when we die.
• More Popular Spin-Off: The band originally started as a solo project for Gibbard, who was, at the time, the guitarist for the band Pinwheel.
• Older Than They Think: The band's name was taken from the title of a song by the musical comedy troupe, The Bonzo Dog Band.
• Refrain from Assuming: They do not have a song called "Everything Ends." They do have a song called "Meet Me on the Equinox".
• Seasonal Rot: Narrow Stairs suffered this criticism from fans when it first came out. It now seems that the fans have grown to like it.
• The Woobie: There's a Woobie in 95% of Death Cab songs.

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