Ben Gibbard is almost a good lyricist...
…but he always seems to end up putting his foot in his mouth.
Describing Lee Harvey Oswald as “slightly bored” and “severely confused” in Sleeping In is a bizarre, weak and roudabout way to describe an assassin who briefly defected to the Soviet Union. Do people often assassinate presidents when they have a flash of boredom, in Ben Gibbard’s mind?
In I Will Follow You Into the Dark he says Catholic school is “as vicious as Roman rule”. The Romans were not exactly teddy bears, but I think the primary connotations of “Roman” is as combination engineer-civilizer, so you have to stop and remember that they still ruled unforgivingly by modern standards. But I guess “as vicious as Mongol rule” doesn’t really work.
Also in that song, the range from Bangkok to Calgary is… confusing? Is the idea that Calgary is about as anti-exotic as you can get, and so they’ve covered everything? Maybe there wasn’t another foreign 3-syllable city he had been to.
I don’t know about him, but when ideas are “drilled” into my head, there’s always someone/something else there to do it to me. I don’t think pictures you find in the glove compartment while looking for your Title and Registration really have the agency to do any “drilling”.
The mismatch between “shrillest highs” and “lowest lows” makes it sound to me like he never finished the lyrics to Such Great Heights.
Surely the Berlin Wall reference in Crooked Teeth means he’s on the East German side, but does that mean the state line, his state line, makes him feel like a… prisoner? Is he confusing the purpose of the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall, which has the intended meaning of “insurmountable barrier” instead of “open-air prison with death squads”?
…and so on. This comes up whenever I put Death Cab or Postal Service on, so now I’ve got a reference.