Having toured extensively throughout 2019 in support of last year’s Thank You for Today, Ben Gibbard and posse finally landed in Southern California a few days ago to play two shows in San Diego before coming up to hit the Bowl along with openers Car Seat Headrest. As with most Bowl shows the crowd was in a never ending state of arrival, even after Death Cab took the stage. Consequently, Car Seat Headrest played to a filling house. Originally a solo project by Will Toledo, CSH parallels the origins of Death Cab, also originally a solo project, separated by thirteen years. And like Death Cab, Toledo traverses a variety of textures and instruments in his recordings, although Sunday’s performance favored crunchy scratchy guitars and fuzzed out solos — think the sunshine of Dinosaur Jr. and the spasticity of scribbly Jonny Greenwood—occasionally joined by glazed Casiotones plinked on a squat synth slung over Toledo’s shoulder when not playing guitar. At one point he appeared to be programming a sequencer from scratch, twisting knobs to his satisfaction before flying into the Strokes-infused “Bodys” from 2011’s Twin Fantasy.

Toledo’s voice, rarely deigning to sustain a note before gliding down into his gullet, provided a nice counterpoint for when his pipes were needed, like on “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” in which that non-committal drowsed-out tenor exploded with determination on the chorus, gnashing his teeth to plead, “It doesn’t have to be like this.” The charm of CSH is the loose unpredictability in which you can see Toledo playing with his form on stage, which marries well to the pensiveness of his lyrics, although sometimes the instrumentation undercuts him. The line “Good lives make bad stories” on “Sober to Death” offered a poignant observation in a brooding, drumless song, which was unfortunately interrupted by a predictable pulsing snare build at the end, somehow castrating it while at the same time giving it “balls”. The set ended with Toledo observing that they only had two minutes left, so they played the sweetly simple “Stop Smoking,” whose only lines are “Stop smoking / We love you / We don’t want you to die,” repeated ad nauseum — or in this case, two minutes.

Death Cab For Cutie, on the other hand, played a streamlined set that stayed true to their recordings, at least the more recent stuff, which has been reviewed as being over-produced to the point of featurelessness. The energy of the musicians on stage, especially Gibbard’s restless dance-playing, was infectious. That said, the instrumentation, however varied, often became a unified, monolithic fundament served solely for Gibbard’s hyper-perfected vocal delivery. This was often the case throughout their performance, which posed no problem to the fans singing along to such ear worms as “Soul Meets Body” and “I Will Possess Your Heart.” Many songs ended in thick distorted climax, pounding keys, and ringing cymbals, and with such a long set (19 songs and a four-song encore), the dopamine depletion noticeably took the mickey out of this trick after the seventh or eighth time.

The setlist, although for the most part fairly democratic career-wise, unfortunately didn’t go any further back than 2003’s Transatlanticism, with the exception of “Styrofoam Plates” from 2001’s The Photo Album. Although, it’s hard to imagine some of those earlier rough-edged triumphs from the Barsuk years played today. Only one song, “You Are a Tourist,” was included from 2011’s divisive, electro-heavy Codes and Keys. And strangely, only a handful of songs from last year’s Thank You for Today were included, making the set feel more like a mid-career retrospective than support for the latest album, except for the inclusion of their new single “Kids in ’99” from their forthcoming The Blue EP, which had its live debut in San Diego only the night before.

As a whole the show was rich with a range of sonics, textures and dazzling light and video — an elongated rectangular scrim nearly the width of the stage displayed a glitchy and colorful abstract video feed out of which a body or pair of thick rimmed glasses would occasionally emerge from the noise. A moment of levity came when guitarist Dave Depper interrupted Gibbard to make the announcement that it was Gibbard’s 43rd birthday and invited the audience to sing to him. Later, during the encore, they were again asked, by Gibbard this time, to sing a verse from “I Will Follow You into the Dark,” at which point Gibbard stepped out of the spotlight and into the dark, and the Bowl sang. As critically divisive as their career has been, Gibbard and Co. have maintained an obsessive dedication to the craft of making music, and for better or worse, they have gained plenty of fans who will follow them into the dark, singing along as they go.

Death Cab For Cutie  Setlist

1. “Passenger Seat”
2. “Dreamt We Spoke Again”
3. “The Ghosts of Beverly Drive”
4. “Long Division”
5. “Title and Registration”
6. “Gold Rush”
7. “Crooked Teeth”
8. ‘No Sunlight”
9. “What Sarah Said”
10. “60 & Punk”
11. “I Will Possess Your Heart”
12. “Grapevine Fires”
13. “Kids in ’99”
14. “Black Sun”
15. “Northern Lights”
16. “Styrofoam Plates”
17. “Cath…”
18. “We Looked Like Giants”
19. “Soul Meets Body”

Encore

20. “I Will Follow You into the Dark”
21. “When We Drive”
22. “Tiny Vessels”
23. “Transatlanticism”