Stopping for Directions

I know, I know... ANOTHER Death Cab post. Please, bear with me.

Yesterday, DCF4C officially released Directions, the "visual companion" DVD to their album Plans. It's a collection of 11 music videos, or short films, each inspired by one of the songs on the album, and each created by a different director, limited only by budget and time.

The band had been previewing one of these each week on their website over the past couple of months, but I only managed to catch the very last video, "Stable Song" by director Aaron Stewart-Ahn, before they took it down.

I was anxious to see the rest of the films on the DVD, so I stopped by the bookstore on the way home from work yesterday to pick up a copy. My efforts at Borders were fruitless, so I decided to try luck at Best Buy (I needed to get a new remote control for my DVD player anyway so I thought, two birds, one stone). When I got to the store I noticed a tour bus parked out front, which I hypothesized might be Edwin McCain's because I remembered he had been in town the night before to sing the national anthem at the Braves home opener, and there was a big "EDWIN MCCAIN" logo and graphics painted on the side of the trailer, so I just put two and two together. "Maybe Edwin is a fan of Death Cab too," I thought, so I parked the car and hurried inside before he snatched up the last copy. When I got inside Edwin was not buying anything at all, rather he was up on stage playing songs off his new album, Lost In America.

Apparently, I had shown up just in time to catch the last few songs of his in-store performance, but not wanting to seem like I had just come by myself to catch a glimpse of some semi-famous soft-rocker in an appliance store, I quickly found the movie aisle and focused intently on the new releases. The staff were all running around like it was Rex Manning Day at Empire Records, a couple of guys were playing X-Box, and the few dozen other patrons who were there all stood crowded around the stage waiting for Edwin to finish playing already so he could hurry up and sign their merch. Not me though. I was shopping. Okay, so I may have tapped my feet a little during the la-dee-da-dee-da's at the end of "Gramercy Park Hotel" but can you blame me? The song's effing catchy. Let he who is without any guilty pleasures cast the first stone.

So it turned out Best Buy didn't have the new Death Cab DVD either, so I was going to have to be more crafty. By now it was getting late, and I was getting pretty hungry, so I decided I was going to give this thing one more shot before calling off the hunt. If Criminal Records, the local know-it-all music boutique, didn't have it then nobody would. So made my way to Little Five Points and went inside to have a look. Not only did they have it, but there was also some sort of Built to Spill album release party thing going on there for their new album, You In Reverse. I mean, Doug Martsch wasn't there or anything, or Edwin McCain, or even Rex Manning, but they had free pizza. Who can turn down free pizza? I pretended to look at some used CDs while I wolfed down five slices (hey, I said I was hungry), then paid for my merch and headed home.

It wasn't until I got home and popped my shiney new "visual companion" into the DVD player that I remembered I forgot to get that remote control at Best Buy. Stupid Edwin McCain!

You can check out the trailer on their website, order a copy on Amazon, or download the videos on iTunes.

UPDATE:

In addition to the 11 videos filmed for the DVD, there are also a couple of bonus tracks, including this live footage filmed on the camera phone of an "annoying fan" who demands to hear "Talking Like Turnstiles" at a DC4C show and then procedes to force his way on stage and get chased off by security. Antics ensue. The "fan" is actually filmmaker Lance Bangs pulling one over on the audience, and other unsuspecting fans.