There was a time when Death Cab For Cutie was gazing wide-eyed at the future, playing its signature introspective post-punk indie rock with a game-for-anything approach, culminating in a string of sonic experiments in the 2010s. Now 30 years into its catalog, the band is closer to its end than its beginning, confronting the inevitability of loss, grief and a calendar that now serves as limitation, not opportunity.
Vocalist Ben Gibbard will turn 50 years his year, joining core members Jason McGerr and Nick Harmer who arrived at the milestone a few years ago. On “I Built You a Tower” they confront the back half of life with weariness and a perspective that only comes with time. “I’m too tired to talk,” Gibbard sings on “Riptide,” near the end of the album. “I’m too tired to end the war/ And I can’t seem to hold it together anymore.”
If lyrical themes offer consistency throughout the band’s 11th album, the music does the opposite, gyrating from the acoustic strains of the opener “Full of Stars” to the Postal Service-adjacent electronica of “Trap Door” to the familiar, angular guitar rock of “Punching the Flowers” and closer “I Built You a Tower (b).”
“Full of Stars” sets the scene with one of Gibbard’s devastating lines: “And all I need/ Is for you to be kind/ But it seems/ It’s rarely worth your time.” Slamming next into “Punching the Flowers,” he sings of a frustrated man whose voice “was the sound of slamming doors” and ends with a killer couplet: “And I’m not sure which is worse; If God laughs or he doesn’t/ And I’m not sure which is worse; If it was love or it wasn’t.”
On “I Envy the Birds,” John Congleton tweaks the intimate production to allow bassist Harmer and drummer McGerr to rock out, with Gibbard sharing, “Speak without words/ No one gets hurt/ It’s safer where it’s quiet.” Would the band have felt the freedom to make such a choice if they had not left Atlantic Records after 22 years to sign with Anti- for this release, their first on an indie label since 2003’s classic “Transatlanticism?”
Artists like Death Cab for Cutie that write emotional songs connect with their listeners on a deeper level, and we experiment, stumble, recover and grow along with them. The band is now in its legacy phase, which can be a difficult thing for both fans and band to countenance. On “I Built You a Tower,” to borrow a lyric from the “Plans” album, we are invited to follow them into the dark. It’s a tricky, messy, rewarding journey on an album that is as good or better than anything it has made in its impactful and influential career.
Rating: 80/81
Leave a Reply