Death Cab For Cutie and the Magik*Magik Orchestra at the Chicago Theatre

After collaborating with San Francisco’s Magik*Magik Orchestra on its latest album, Codes And Keys, Death Cab For Cutie elected to take the string octet on the road for a month of shows (including two dates at the Chicago Theatre, one last night, and one tonight, April 17). The evening’s set list spanned the band’s 15-year career, resulting in an ultimately successful blend of old and new.

The supporting acts surrounding Death Cab For Cutie’s current tour represent the disparate sounds and approaches the band has explored throughout their career. Opening the shows for this orchestral jaunt is the perpetually excellent slowcore group Low, whose sparse arrangements and elegiac vocals influenced the headliner’s early material. “We [Death Cab For Cutie] were all huge fans of Low before we even met each other, [and] we bonded over how much all loved them,” remarked Death Cab frontman Ben Gibbard before dedicating “Bend To Squares,” a quiet, lyrically obtuse track from their 1998 debut album Something About Airplanes, to the quiet pioneers.

While the band seemed genuinely happy to have such an influential group on tour with it, the real focus of the night was the orchestra. The arrangements, courtesy of Magik*Magik founder Minna Choi, worked best with the band’s newer, texturally complex material. Some older guitar-centric cuts, like the moody, Codeine-aping “No Joy In Mudville,” were apparently not written with swelling cellos in mind, making for one of the evening’s only musical missteps.

The Magik*Magik Orchestra aptly played off of Death Cab’s cinematic jams throughout the evening. The orchestra added muscle to the opening medley of “Passenger Seat” and “Different Names For The Same Thing,” and performed new arrangements of songs like “Soul Meets Body” and “Hindsight,” a track from the band’s 2002 demo collection You Can Play These Songs With Chords (one of the many instances of diehard fan service that the band happily indulged in throughout the night).

The band spent much of the six-song encore performing an all-acoustic mini-set (including a cover of “Wait,” a song by local luminary Geoff Farina’s old band, Secret Stars) before bringing the orchestra back out for a climactic closing performance of “Tiny Vessels” and “Transatlanticism,” ending the night with a quiet wall of squall from Gibbard’s feedback-addled amp stack.

Though sporadic sound mixing issues resulted in some sonic flatness, rendering an occasional guitar part completely inaudible, the string additions, smorgasbord set list, and the elegant, opulent environs of the Chicago Theatre made up for the small technical issues. This tour explores a sonic crossroads between the elegant slowcore of Low and the lavishness of Death Cab’s newly orchestral rock, resulting in an intriguing night of indie rock Sliding Doors.

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