u/vhszach

Okay so sort of clickbaity title but I do need to specify up front: I liked TYFT and Asphalt Meadows; there was just something about them that didn’t quite feel like the Death Cab I knew (because it wasn’t). This is expected and understandable when you make such a drastic change to a band lineup.

Ben’s lyrics have stayed consistently great, and the songwriting never faltered, but the instrumentation and mixing fell a bit flat for me at times on the last few records. I’ve seen them live on every tour since Chris left, and they have never failed to put on an incredible show - but the studio albums never made it into my heavy rotation the way that Walla’s did.

That being said, I Built You a Tower is scratching that “old Death Cab” itch for me, while still feeling really fresh. It feels like they finally took the training wheels off of Dave + Zach and let them properly cook. Jason and Nick are absolutely on fire on this record as well, and everything feels to truly click behind Ben for the first time.

Punching the Flowers hits on a Photo Album vibe with the punchy and aggressive drum part and busy tapping on the guitars. Pep Talk would feel right at home on Plans or Codes. Envy the Birds moving time signatures and dissonant chord progressions feel like Narrow Stairs.

I could almost feel where each song pulled its inspiration from, but none of them felt like rehashes of old songs.

The true peak of the album for me though, is How Heavenly a State. This song fucks. This is where I feel like everything comes together and every single member of the band comes together to say “this is us now. Get on board or get out of the way.”

I’m on board.

This is my favorite Death Cab record since Kintsugi, and I genuinely think it’s going to keep working its way up my rankings even higher - which I never thought I’d say as a Walla fanboy.

Anyway, I just wanted to ramble about how much I am enjoying this record. Let me know how you all are feeling!

I’m in the Hyde Park area and Google Fiber has gone down two days in a row now. Does anyone know what is going on?

Their app has a generic “outages in your area” message and calling customer service gets me an automated agent telling me when it’s estimated to be fixed, but I’m just curious what is causing the recurring outages.

Both my wife and I work from home so this is crazy inconvenient.

Does anyone using the dbrand Killswitch case have any recommendations for a right angle USB-C adapter? Basically just looking for a nice L shape dongle, or even a very short M to F usb-c cable that allows me to have the charging cable plug in from the back instead of the top of the machine.

There’s hundreds on AliExpress for like $1-5 but instead of buying a handful and seeing which ones actually fit, I figured I’d ask if anyone had experience with this specific scenario.

Seriously do the bag upgrades ever stop increasing? I’m at the point rn where it’s $8k for a single slot and I keep expecting the price to plateau but it never does.

Every single time I enter a zone I dump EVERYTHING except potions/pokeballs into my chest and I still end up with the stupid “there is not enough space in your inventory for this item” within like 5-10 minutes of exploration. I use grit dust/xp candies immediately just to save the bag space and still can’t carry everything.

How is there no “send to camp” option or something 😭

I’m waiting on my Rainbow Max model and, like many of us, have been coping with the wait times by obsessively consuming as much media as possible on the Thor and building out my library.

I’ve noticed that nobody making Thor content seems to have touched on the Xbox at all. I know that it’s a less supported niche, but I haven’t seen anything - not even failed attempts.

It looks like there’s a 360 emulator that’s still in beta and seems to be pretty rough - but is there anything out there for the OG Xbox?

One of my favorite retro games is Jet Set Radio Future which was an Xbox exclusive and was never ported to another console that I know of. If anyone knows of another way to play it I’d be interested as well!