Death Cab For Cutie - The Puberty of Indie

Talking about Death Cab For Cutie nowadays inevitably means reckoning with the side effects of popularity. More specifically, with how fame can suddenly land inside an artistic project that had always made independence—not just stylistic, but also attitudinal—its banner, forcing the musicians to start thinking about how to satisfy an ever-growing fanbase. And there was a moment, first with the buzz stirred up in alternative circles by records like The Photo Album and Transatlanticism, and then, above all, with the spotlight cast by the famous TV series The O.C., when Ben Gibbard and his bandmates gave the impression of definitely keeping this side of their notoriety in mind.
Then again, a brief moment of wavering certainly doesn't mean they'd surrendered for good, and the statement with which the frontman introduced the new record Codes And Keys to the public is without doubt a proud reassertion of their autonomy. “I don't care whether people like it or not, I like it a lot”: more or less Gibbard's words, which sound like an attempt to shake off the need to come across as a user-friendly band. One could debate at length how belated this return to a mindset that puts artistic autonomy first really is, and how it might conceal, on one hand, the struggles of a compositional spark no longer as fervent as it once was, and on the other, an actual desire to win over a wider following among less attentive listeners, who unfortunately make up the majority. Still, it's not easy to find another band of this caliber that has shown such a determined, if perhaps somewhat clumsy, will to push back against the downward spiral that success sometimes brings with it.

Like many other groups that would go on to become important, Death Cab For Cutie were born out of the need of a single musician—in this case Ben Gibbard, from the Seattle area—to put together a band after the positive response he got from a demo he wrote and recorded entirely on his own. You Can Play These Songs With Chords saw the light of day only on cassette in 1997, at a time when the creative history of a perpetually vibrant city like Seattle was going through a transitional moment.
The spotlight that had shone during the grunge years was starting to dim: bands like Soundgarden and Screaming Trees had reached their swan song the previous year, 1996, and Pearl Jam had begun decisively broadening their sound. At the same time, bands like Carissa's Wierd, Pedro The Lion and Microphones were taking their first steps—they wouldn't start putting out records until two years later, but at that point they already existed, albeit in embryonic form, just like Ben Gibbard's project. It's also worth remembering that two of the most important independent labels in the entire United States, Sub Pop and Barsuk, were based right in Seattle and were increasingly consolidating their reputations.

From early flights to the foundations for the future

Against this backdrop, the then one-man band Death Cab For Cutie—whose name was taken from the title of a song featured in the film “Magical Mystery Tour”—fit right in with an output that drew fully on the so-called alternative style that had taken hold in the United States, built on a clearly lo-fi sound and on songwriting whose melodic side was developed with the same rough-hewn approach used to capture the sound itself, plus a fairly steady pace to the songs. Within these eight songs, though, it's fairly easy to spot certain strengths that led Barsuk to sign Gibbard after hearing the demo.
First, there's already a marked personality to the melodic style, which at this point hasn't yet taken on a very defined shape, but which already clearly has a touch distinguishable from any other songwriter; then there's a solid vocal versatility, thanks to which Gibbard manages to give each song different emotional shadings depending on the register he chooses to use; finally, the sound is fairly compact but on more than one occasion manages to escape any risk of staticness, showing instead a certain dynamism, and even when it does come across as more monotone, it never does so in a boring way. One important factor in the overall success of the record is that the melodic development is rough, yes, but rough in different ways from song to song. There are, in fact, some more fully realized, less elusive melodic moments that stick easily in your head, like the chorus of “Pictures In An Exhibition” and that of the closing “Line Of Best Fit”.
Ultimately, You Can Play These Songs With Chords is a work that shows off a strikingly creative artist, very skilled at displaying his own talent and versatility with the few means he had available. In 2002, Barsuk reissued an expanded version with 10 more songs, by then written and recorded by the full band rather than by Gibbard alone, among which a personal and well-executed cover of “This Charming Man” stands out.

As mentioned, the record deal Gibbard signed meant he needed an actual band to work with him. So he recruited guitarist and pianist Chris Walla, who would start helping the frontman write some of the songs, bassist Nick Harmer and drummer Nathan Good. The only subsequent lineup changes would then happen exclusively behind the drum kit, with the arrival of Michael Shorr in 2000 and Jason McGerr in 2003. The first Death Cab For Cutie album as an actual band came out in 1998, titled Something About Airplanes.
Aside from a sound that was now clearly the product of a group of musicians rather than one person playing and overdubbing every part, the broad outlines of this debut are the same as the previous year's demo, not least because five of its ten songs were carried over from it.
The ones that undergo the most noticeable revision are “President Of What?”, with a noticeably cleaner sound that brings the keyboard's melodic line out much more clearly, and the aforementioned “Line Of Best Fit”, which instead goes through the opposite process: the volume balance is reworked so the vocals are almost smothered by the guitars, resulting in a bit less immediacy but a greater overall charm. The same trick is used for the rereading of “Pictures From An Exhibition” and for one of the new songs, “The Face That Launched 1000 Shits”, and another new touch is the violin lines brought to the fore on opener “Bend To Square”, a song that starts off as a more conventional ballad than anything Gibbard had shown us before, but which then returns to his usual stylistic tracks.
Overall, the frontman gives the impression of using the availability of other musicians, and presumably a better-quality recording, not so much to explore new territory compared to when he worked alone, but to find new solutions within the boundaries he was already most comfortable with. The result is a record that keeps the same independent attitude while making for a more interesting, stimulating and engaging listen.
Something About Airplanes was well received within indie circles, though naturally it didn't catch the attention of a more mainstream audience. In 2008, a tenth-anniversary edition was released, including a bonus disc featuring the recording of the band's very first show ever, held, of course, in Seattle.

Two years pass and in 2000 along comes We Have The Facts And We're Voting Yes. The record marks a clear attempt by the band to break away from a style in which electric saturation played a fairly significant role, offering instead a leaner sound built on guitar riffs meant to be agile and incisive. At the same time, the melodies come across as rounder and better defined, and the overall result seems designed to let each song's individual mood come through much more easily.
It's something of a leitmotif for the whole of Death Cab For Cutie's output from here on out, so there's no denying the album's importance in laying out a set of stylistic coordinates that would become the foundation on which the band would build its best-realized work. This record isn't among them, though, for two main reasons: first, the melodies aren't always inspired or well focused; second, the sound is too static, which too often leaves the songs dragging wearily.
Take “No Joy In Mudville”: the melody is interesting and well supported by both the guitars and the rhythm section, but the interplay is so locked in on itself that it ends up losing all its effectiveness over the course of the song. The struggle to make it to the end of a song is even more evident where that same staticness is paired with a melody that's anything but memorable, which happens more than once, especially in the three-song stretch of “Lowell, MA”, “405” and “Little Fury Bugs”.
There's no shortage, though, of strong moments on the record, songs with well-crafted writing and a musical backing truly capable of realizing the band's artistic intentions mentioned above—specifically, bringing out melancholy feelings in a credible, engaging way on “Title Track” and “For What Reason”, a gentle but determined urge for vindication on closer “Scientist studies”, and the attempt to set up a wonderful emotional contrast between the verve of “Company Calls” and the bitterness inherent in the following “Company Calls Epilogue”.
Thanks to these moments, and above all to its influence down the line, the record doesn't deserve to be written off, even though it is a step back from the band's beginnings.

A wide-awake sprint

The following record, 2002's The Photo Album, represents a crucial turning point in Death Cab For Cutie's career. For the first time, the qualitative consistency of their early work is matched by the ability to churn out pop melodies non-stop and without the dips in inspiration seen on the previous record; on top of that, the lyrics start to take on a certain importance, here proving perfect for further embodying the feelings conveyed by the writing and playing of the individual songs.
The result is a set of songs with real substance, however you choose to look at them. It's now clear that the talent of Ben Gibbard and co. has fully blossomed, after a necessary period in which the groundwork was laid to reach a complete expression of their potential, and the passage that best captures this genuine springtime is the chorus of “A Movie Script Ending”, where Gibbard sings, in a tone as soft as it is resolute, a handful of simple, effective words: “Passing through unconsious states, when I awoke I was on the highway”.
Those states of unconsciousness could easily stand for the moments of inspirational torpor found on the previous record, while waking up on the highway represents the ability to unleash one's talent without restraint while still keeping control of the situation, the same way you can travel at high speed on a highway and still steer the vehicle with ease. And there's plenty of talent on this record: from the aforementioned knack for never missing a melody, having by now shed the alternative mold of their early days in favor of more pop-oriented songwriting, to the ability to remain sonically independent even while smoothing out many rough edges in deference to that melodic style—again without any drop in quality, and finally managing to find the necessary dynamism.
The result of all this is the explosive expressive power of the individual songs: the melancholy, romantic naivety of opener “Steadier Footing”, the irritated unease of “We Laugh Indoors”, the senseless choice to endure the urban decay of big cities just to chase illusory opportunities in “Why You'd Want To Live Here”, all the way to the struggle to make good on one's urge for vindication on closer “Debate Exposes Doubt”.
The breadth of ways the guitar is used, the ability to avoid getting stuck on the same riffs or on the same moments of heavier saturation, the role of the keyboard—never intrusive yet always important for that same variety—Gibbard's increased vocal dexterity and his always sharp, concrete lyrics: all these elements mean that the cliché about the third album being the one where a band reaches maturity comes true here in the best possible way.
The importance of The Photo Album also lies in the fact that it doesn't represent an endpoint for the band: this is, in fact, the first time, but not the last, that Death Cab For Cutie put every single piece in exactly the right place, and having pulled it off here would prove a huge help to the band in releasing, just a year later, their undisputed masterpiece.

Casting off the moorings of indie isolationism

[…] Every Tuesday I’d brave those mountain passes
And you’d skip your early classes
And we’d learn how our bodies worked
(“We Looked Like Giants”)

There it is, the vivid tangle of bodies on the prowl, intent and straining in their timid movements in the back seat of dad's car; there's the thick scent of young, bare skin. Transatlanticism wasn't the soundtrack to the most successful teen dramas by chance—quite the opposite; it was the result of an easy calculation. Everything about this record carries within it the powerful, overflowing feelings—however confined to the “low orbit” of its own emotional microcosm—of that age, exemplifying its passions and fears, polishing them into a work of universal value.
Ben Gibbard's poetics of minimalist, Carver-esque intensity reach here, in fact, heights perhaps never attained, before or since, in Death Cab For Cutie's career, nor in much of the independent scene of the past decade. The tiny, almost atomic ache of “Passenger Seat” (nothing more than the account of a few miles of a nighttime drive, with his girlfriend behind the wheel, him in the passenger seat, as the title suggests) exemplifies the record's epiphanic power—not to mention the “glove compartment” of “Title And Registration”. At other times it's a vivid allegorical transport that draws us into the world of feelings that grow boundlessly within inner spaces, taking on, once stretched out by their own solitude, the sprawling, overwhelming vastness of the oceans (the title track).
Naturally, it's also the record's strictly musical content that gives Transatlanticism the thoroughly physical, carnal intensity of its overflowing emotions. Chris Walla's guitar twists with an almost tangible plasticity on “Title And Registration” and “The Sound Of Settling”, surges as if in a sexual paroxysm on “We Looked Like Giants” and “The New Year”, scratches and caresses on the anthem of timid romantic skirmishes that is “A Lack Of Color”.
A record that transcends—musically speaking, that is—the “use” that American popular culture would go on to make of it, thanks to absolute-class tracks like “Death Of An Interior Decorator”, where Gibbard shows off all his extraordinary songwriting skills, weaving between notes and chords until bursting into one of the most poignant bridges of the decade. Or, when he explicitly sets out to champion popular culture, as on “The New Year”, he manages to turn the thoroughly personal ghosts of an alienated restlessness (“So this is the new year/ And I don't feel any different”) into an anthem to the Road of Kerouac, of McCarthy, to the existential drive toward discovery—not just material, but symbolic and inner—toward the great journey:

I wish the world was flat like the old days
So I could travel just by folding the map
No more airplanes or speed-trains or freeways
There’d be no distance that could hold us back

The world of TV shows and film, vehicles in the new millennium ferrying indie bands across the ford toward popularity, would go on to propel Death Cab For Cutie to the status of a leading band on the American scene, a status that also came with widespread critical acclaim and the predictable backlash against the maturity the band had reached (including in their choice of “professional” production tools)—a remarkable journalistic blind spot, in this sense, from Pitchfork, who seemed almost unprepared for the Seattle band's change of course.
A mainstream popularity that would allow them to take part, alongside names like Pearl Jam, R.E.M. and Bruce Springsteen, in the massive “electoral” tour in support of John Kerry (running against George W. Bush) called “Vote For Change”, which took them all around the country. In these years, Chris Walla rose to the rank of production guru and became the deus ex machina of the Pacific Northwest scene, producing records for the area's leading bands (chief among them the Decemberists and Carissa's Wierd), while Ben Gibbard found a degree of personal fame as well through the parallel electro-pop project The Postal Service, alongside Jimmy Tamborello of Dntel, releasing that same year “Give Up”, a hit that would go on to sell a hundred thousand copies.

Plans to Win the Heart

One of my favorite bits of dark humor is: “How do you make God laugh? Make a plan.” No one ever imagines a plan in which you walk outside and get hit by a car. A plan always has a happy ending. Essentially, every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time. I really like the idea of a plan that isn’t judged by defined outcomes, but by small wishes.
Ben Gibbard

Death Cab For Cutie’s mutation from indie-rock standard-bearers and nerd-pride flagbearers into infallible disruptors of the cardiovascular pulse of a “generational” American audience – and beyond – reaches its peak on Plans, from 2005. The album is also the first following the band’s move from the indie label Barsuk to Atlantic: a real slap in the face to the most hardcore fans, one that would be countered with clauses guaranteeing creative independence – most notably the decision to record the album in a converted farmhouse studio in Massachusetts – and so on.
Probably all true, and Atlantic could certainly afford to give Gibbard and co. free rein, since by that point the die was already cast and Death Cab For Cutie were unlikely to miss the mark.

Plans, compared to the preceding Transatlanticism, is a necessary emotional unburdening after a demanding epic of all-consuming emotions, of songs whose sheer weight reverberates onto the new material, draining it, intimidating it, turning the new into a faded copy of the old.
Ben Gibbard’s songwriting seems, accordingly, more timid and withdrawn, folding inward into intimate vignettes of hazy piano ballads, from “Different Names For The Same Thing” to “What Sarah Said”, by way of “Summer Skin” and “Brother On A Hotel Bed”. Amid this constant, listless half-light of blurred feelings, Walla and the rest of the band try to inject a bit of life into the songs’ dim, crepuscular glow, succeeding only partially through sudden rhythmic surges, with the bass dictating the pulse of a song coming back to life.
Aside from that, Gibbard’s pensively languid monologue only truly wakes up in the opening build – a kind of premonitory mantra – of “Marching Bands Of Manhattan” and in the dazed hook of the hit “Soul Meets Body”, both successfully recapturing the emotional and compositional obliqueness that is the band’s trademark.

A tired, ultimately insubstantial album, one that circles around the admittedly lovely, Smiths-like graveyard strum of “I Will Follow You Into The Dark”, sketching out a limbo of love that becomes the emblem of the impalpable emotional apathy running through Plans.
Commercial satisfaction wasn’t long in coming, with a fourth-place finish on the Billboard chart, Grammy nominations, and big venues like Madison Square Garden filled with ease. Death Cab For Cutie had by now entered the mainstream, in years when indie and mainstream seemed to be losing their mutual resistance to one another.

A New Awareness

You gotta spend some time, love
you gotta spend some time with me
and I know that you’ll find, love
I will possess your heart

There’s a new self-awareness at play on the following album, Narrow Stairs. Partly due to Gibbard losing some of his sharpness, the band realizes it can no longer reduce its role to that of a mere backing act, an interpreter of its frontman’s creative source, a simple decorator of spaces and worlds built by its architect – it has to invent the places of its own expression firsthand.
That’s how a track like the album’s lead single takes shape: the eight-plus minutes of “I Will Possess Your Heart”.
In the song’s strange, anxiety-inducing urban psychedelia, Death Cab For Cutie perpetuate their “generational” vocation, their unique ability to intercept the mood of the moment, to condense chaos into forms that are both elusive and obsessive, watching them grow into something that gradually transcends purely personal meaning and becomes universal, crossing even the boundaries of their own usual themes.
The Seattle band’s arrival at a bolder sound is unmistakable, starting with Gibbard’s vocals, which carry a propulsive urgency never heard before. The full-bodied drive of Chris Walla’s guitar arrangements even turns the otherwise harmless power-pop of “No Sunlight” into a pressing burst of rare expressive urgency, for a group of veterans like the Death Cab For Cutie of Narrow Stairs.
And it’s when Gibbard’s writing shines again that the album reaches its peak, on “Cath…”, a sort of re-staging – partly musical, partly thematic – of “Death For An Interior Decorator”, in which you can almost hear a visceral amplification of the carnal guitars of Transatlanticism. The return to a more genuine musical expressiveness is a none-too-hidden goal of the album, given that the band would go back to recording all playing together, rather than instrument by instrument.
Narrow Stairs is, overall, an album with a pop “punch” perhaps unprecedented for the group, which nonetheless manages to reconcile its status as an international band with a recovery of at least the sonic clarity of its best work. On “Your New Twin Size Bed”, however pale and reassuring a replica it may be of the imaginative power of certain Gibbard tracks, something of – perhaps more than – the crispness of the band’s best material returns.
Gibbard’s struggles, on the other hand, are confirmed not so much by the (predictable and inevitable, given the frontman’s veneration of Kerouac) sentimental postcard from Big Sur that is “Bixby Canyon Bridge”, unexpectedly revived by its heavy ending, but also by the cloying allegories of “The Ice Is Getting Thinner”, a disappointing B-movie set piece.
This blend of commercial openness and renewed, if partial, artistic freshness paved the way for further success for the band: their first Billboard #1, and more or less enthusiastic reviews from one side of the planet to the other.
Death Cab For Cutie also remained a favorite herald of teen-oriented media, taking a prominent role on the soundtrack of the “Twilight” sequel, which otherwise proved an interesting moment of crossover between indie artists and big-studio filmmaking.

A couple of years later – by now it’s late 2010 – it’s already time for the feverish anticipation preceding the release of Codes And Keys (2011), for the first time produced externally, and by none other than Alan Moulder, once a guru of the shoegaze scene and now the author of many of the biggest – and most debated – pop-rock successes of recent years, from “Sam’s Town” by the Killers to “Favourite Worst Nightmare” by the Arctic Monkeys, right up to the most recent White Lies.
Under the wing of their new mentor, Death Cab For Cutie unveil an album that seems tailor-made to burst out of stadium speakers, on the back of basslines (“Underneath The Sycamore”, “Monday Morning”) that seem built to rattle seats, just as the whip-crack guitar riffs (“You Are A Tourist”) already seem to echo around highway curves.
The risk of entrusting oneself to the expert hand of an outsider, after a career built on the partnership – compositional on one side, production on the other – of Ben Gibbard and Chris Walla, is that of sacrificing part of one’s own stylistic signature to the mirage of a hit sound, some sleight of hand that might suddenly revive something inert.
Narrow Stairs had been a solid attempt at building something more ambitious, even if firmly underpinned by the interplay of a group of veterans, structured as a progressive piling-up of contributions (see the already-mentioned “I Will Possess Your Heart”). The effort made on that album is here sacrificed on the altar of a bland, indistinguishable contemporaneity, made up of homogenized, repetitive, artificial solutions and artfully bloated arrangements that flatten the attention to detail Walla has always lavished on the folds of Death Cab For Cutie songs – one example among others being the emotional pomposity (complete with sweeping strings) of the title track, which recalls the latest Band Of Horses, once a band one might have considered the polar opposite of these guys.
Synthetic surges and layered beats drown the already thin expressive content of “St. Peter’s Cathedral”, while the jagged, awkwardly melodic vocal line of “Some Boys”, typically Gibbard-esque, is cheapened by the usual bombastic musical trappings, complete with a return of that “breathing” rhythmic backing.
Gibbard shields his own retreat from storytelling, limiting himself here, for the most part, to sketching out verses, no longer finding within himself the inspiration to flesh out stories, instead citing the emotional stability reached through his marriage to another star of the indie/mainstream world, Zooey Deschanel. This is the suspected reason behind the painless, sunnier turn in the singer’s lyrics.

It seems, in short, that it makes no difference which band is cast in the role of the new U2: the suit is always the same, you just have to shorten or lengthen it to fit the new lucky (?) wearer. Death Cab For Cutie are among the latest to be saddled with this mission: a risky one, since they wouldn’t be the first of Moulder’s stable to find themselves in trouble, not just artistically but with their audience too.

Four years pass before the band returns with a new album, one that would turn out to be the last for Chris Walla, who announced mid-way through the sessions that he would leave the group once they were finished. Kintsugi (2015) marks an improvement over the previous album, even if it still doesn’t reach the level one would expect from Death Cab, given their pedigree.
Compared to Codes And Keys, the sound is still a touch too polished, but some major issues have been ironed out. The melodies are all good or fairly good, and the arrangement choices are less ambitious but decidedly better judged. The band simply relies on guitar arpeggios that don’t move in lockstep with the melody but interact with it within a well-defined structure, or on the guitar’s own reverb (the second verse of “Little Wanderer”), or on its disappearance altogether (“The Ghost Of Beverly Drive”, again in the second verse), or on a steadily building accompaniment (“You’ve Haunted Me All Your Life”), or on something nearly imperceptible yet able to add color (“Hold No Guns”); on the closing “Binary Sea”, piano makes an appearance. Amid all this, the opening “No Room In Frame” deserves a mention as the best track of the lot, thanks to a particularly inspired melody and a marked vitality.
On the other hand, certain flaws keep the album from really taking off: the songs almost never break out of the rigid verse-chorus alternation; there’s an excessive insistence on chasing a nostalgic mood coated in negativity at all costs, and in some cases you get the impression the hand has been forced a bit too much to pursue this intent; Gibbard’s vocal timbre has by now definitively lost its old bite, and his singing is inexpressive to the point of being monotone.
Weighing the lights and shadows, the album is a pleasant enough listen, and between seeing the glass half full or half empty, we lean toward the former, especially considering the improvements over the previous record. Of course, it’s hard by now to expect any great sparks from Death Cab, but at least with this album we know we haven’t lost them entirely.

After three years of silence, in late summer 2018 Death Cab For Cutie returned with a new album, titled Thank You For Today. Once again without his partner-in-arms Chris Walla, Ben Gibbard continues exploring new solutions while remaining firmly anchored to his roots. The goal remains to move beyond the band’s last, rather dull, studio efforts.

With this in mind, “Thank You For Today” sits halfway across the ford – which is already something, if you will. The embrace of synths, a direct consequence of Walla’s departure, announces itself from the very first seconds of “I Dreamt We Spoke Again”, one of the album’s tentative attempts to reconcile past and present with that extra new-wave aftertaste. The arpeggios suspended in a backlit veil of melancholy on “Summer Years” can’t help but recall Real Estate. Even bolder, for a band of this pedigree, is the easygoing funk of “Gold Rush”, which on its own sounds almost more Primal Scream – believe it or not – than Primal Scream’s own recent work. Who would have guessed?

It must be said that, alongside a few passages that are more bland than outright mediocre (“Autumn Love”, “60 & Punk”, and also “Your Hurricane”, a poor copy of the love songs that once stole the show), there are a few notable peaks: while “When We Drive” could be the narrative continuation of “Passenger Seat”, complete with the obligatory trail of melancholy and chills, the melodies of “Northern Lights” and “Near/Far” let us rediscover Gibbard’s sharp pen. And we, ever faithful yet by now skeptical, who thought it had been lost somewhere among some shapeless sweater, or buried under a pile of old TV-show DVDs…

A year later, in the fall of 2019, Death Cab For Cutie released The Blue Ep, a collection of 5 unreleased songs, partly salvaged from the sessions of the previous album.
A short set of songs that is, on closer inspection, even sharper and more interesting than the one offered on “Thank You For Today”. There’s a calmer mood here, a desire to go back to carving out those deep melodies, capable of digging into the human soul, that are the Bellingham combo’s trademark. Rather than the restless indie rock of “Kids in ’99”, we get to enjoy the open letter of “Man In Blue”, which plumbs new depths of introspection, the chiaroscuro motions of “Before The Bombs”, and a “To The Ground” that proceeds with its headlights off until it opens up into those melodic vistas and instrumental climaxes on which Death Cab have built a successful career. The ballad closes out the tracklist with “Blue Bloods”, the perfect embodiment of how you can be classic, precisely, without ever slipping into banality.

At the start of 2021, on the heels of the outcome of the presidential election and the Georgia runoff, Death Cab For Cutie threw themselves into an impromptu covers EP: The Georgia Ep. Ben Gibbard and co.’s choices leaned mostly toward bands actually hailing from Georgia – the only apparent “outsiders” seem to be Neutral Milk Hotel, originally from Louisiana, whose “The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One” the Seattle band reinterprets without offering much that’s substantially new compared to the original. The best versions are in fact those of TLC’s “Waterfalls” and R.E.M.’s “Fall On Me”, particularly the former, which is aptly translated into the language of American indie rock, smoothing out its edges and bringing out its melodic lines. The version of Vic Chesnutt’s “Flirted With You All My Life” is decent, while the take on Cat Power’s “Metal Heart” comes across as rather shaky.

The project as a whole can still be called a success, not least given the extremely short time in which it was put together.

In early autumn 2022, after an EP and an album of covers, Death Cab For Cutie returned with a new studio album. With Asphalt Meadows, the band's sound takes yet another sidestep, thanks to a greater reliance on synthetic instrumentation than their usual indie-rock formula. Nothing wrong with that in itself, except that the overall result feels less focused, almost disjointed, and often lacking that emo component which, since time immemorial, has flavored DCFC's songs and made them even greater. All things that, all told, still worked on the previous “Thank You For Today”, which was wrapped in a still-distinctive grace.
Here, the band seem to be desperately searching for the magical balance that has accompanied so many chapters of the Seattle band's saga, without managing to find it. Ben Gibbard has his hands full navigating between crepuscular pieces (“Rand McNally”), structured uptempo numbers (“Here To Forever”), spoken-word digressions (“Fragments From The Decade”) occasionally swept by electric surges (“Foxglove Through The Clearcut”): if anything, it's precisely the frontman's unmistakable voice, as on “I Don't Know How I Survive”, that stands out, a new footnote to an unforgiving autobiography.
Without any real missteps in the tracklist, and perhaps with a few scattered peaks (“Pepper”, built on acoustic roots) standing out almost quietly against a level that's never been so mediocre, Asphalt Meadows gives us a Death Cab For Cutie that's more uncertain about which path to take and less incisive even compared to the recent past. Almost always lacking that sacred fire which has always warmed their songs.

Searching for a glimmer of light in the midst of a difficult moment. It's from this premise that I Built You A Tower (2026), Death Cab For Cutie's eleventh album, gradually takes shape. The first record released on Anti-, after twenty-two years with major label Atlantic, this new chapter of Benjamin Gibbard's creature officially marks a return to the independent circuit. The album stems from the frontman's divorce, and the resulting need to pick up the pieces and put his present back in order.
Also standing out in the role of producer and engineer is John Congleton, by now a guarantee of quality whenever indie-rock and indie-pop are concerned, just think of names like Angel Olsen, St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten, or the sophomore album by Friko, released not long ago, also produced by him.
The curtain rises gradually on the fears expressed by the measured pace of piano and guitar on “Full Of Stars”, whose notes cradle the fragile attempts to save a relationship, ultimately in vain, a perfect anteroom to the excellent moment that follows, the feisty “Punching The Flowers”. From the opening lines of the latter, accompanied by a claustrophobic mood skillfully served up by drum patterns and an iron-clad bassline, we find a first reference to the circle depicted on the cover, where the protagonist keeps wandering with no way out, his words ending up wounding the very person trying to make him feel better.
The subtly dark pop of “Pep Talk”, brightened by flickers of guitar, tambourine and, in its second half, streaks of synth, tells of the effort to stay balanced when all the colors seem to blend into a pitch-black darkness, continuing to build the architecture of pain with the bittersweet “I Built You A Tower (A)”. In this first part of the title track, marked by a brief, orchestral-flavored bridge, the theme of the “circular prison” already encountered in “Punching The Flowers” returns, this time trapping the memory and recollections of someone the protagonist wished he could have held onto forever. A sudden desire for peace and silence takes over, together with the urge to soar into the sky (to escape yet another argument) expressed by the insistent riffs of “Envy The Birds”, in a rethinking of language that might even recall the one explored time and again by Jean-Luc Godard in his films, particularly in “Adieu au langage” (2014) and in the famous dialogue between Nana, the character played by Anna Karina, and the existentialist philosopher Brice Parain in “Vivre sa vie” (1962).
There's a moment to catch one's breath with the gentle sway of the placid ballad “Stone Over Water”, just in time to collide with the post-punk revival airs lent by the solid rhythms and frantic shifts of pace of “How Heavenly A State”, whose lyrics draw on some dreams Gibbard had, in which a friend of his who had died by suicide several years earlier appeared.
Leading the way towards the close are the piano flickers and chimes of the alt-pop ballad “Trap Door”, the prominent bass of “Riptides”, and “The Flavor Of Metal”, which openly references the search for light of Leonard Cohen's “Anthem”, but with a generous extra dose of fear.
The conclusion is left to “I Built You A Tower (B)”, which picks up some of the lines from the A-side in an Interpol-like key; here, the earlier-voiced impossibility of thinking about anyone else crumbles, fading away under the weight of the exhaustion of dwelling on the past. Thanks to more inspired songwriting and a sharply focused concept, with “I Built You A Tower”, Death Cab For Cutie hold their heads up high again, both on a personal level, especially for Gibbard, and musically, after a string of less fortunate outings.

Stefano Bartolotta: You Can Play These Songs With Chords, Something About Airplanes, We Have The Facts And We’re Voting Yes, The Photo Album, Kintsugi;
Lorenzo Righetto: Transatlanticism, Plans, Narrow Stairs, Codes And Keys;
Fabio Guastalla: Thank You For Today, The Blue Ep, The Georgia Ep, Asphalt Meadows;
Martina Vetrugno: I Built You A Tower

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