Death Cab for Cutie - Plans
MusicMash Rating: not rated yet
Pitchfork Media Rating: 6.5
Death Cab for Cutie once released an EP called Stability, the irony being
that it was one of their few releases that branches away from their
core sound. That's fine, to a point. Their stately, melodic
indie pop gives them a big enough palette with which to paint albums that
don't lose their flavor on the bedpost overnight, but it also means that
their records can feel interchangeable.
On Plans, the band's fifth album, Death Cab made the jump from the friendly
confines of Barsuk Records to the storied halls of Atlantic, a move that makes a lot of
sense. The band is ready for the large, diverse
audience a major can provide, and they make the transition seamlessly, in large part due to the underrated production of guitarist Chris Walla, who has a way of making even the
weirder flourishes (and the band tries a few to mixed success here) feel
totally natural.
Despite Walla's consistently cozy production, Ben Gibbard's lyrics continue to move
from critiques of middle-class life to tackling Big Themes, here the relationship between death and love. On "What Sarah Said" he claims, "Love is watching someone die." On "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" it's the
title sentiment, and on
"Soul Meets Body" he says, "If the silence takes you, then I hope it
takes me too."
"I Will Follow You..." is the album's quiet centerpiece, just Gibbard on
acoustic guitar, his fragile, almost falsetto tenor, simple delivery, and unexpected
turns of phrase turning an well-worn lyrical road, the fear of losing a lover, into something affecting. The way he
personalizes the afterlife and draws in childhood Catholic school
experiences is impressive, to say the
least. All this and it's sequenced directly after the album's most
musically ambitious track, "Different Names for the Same Thing", an overly melodramatic track that heads off on a ponderous, M83-aping electronic odyssey.
The band's other, better experiment is lead single "Soul Meets Body", a sleek pop track
that excels except for when the drums drop
dead, the textures get all smooshy, and Gibbard goes up the scale to sing the
title-- it's such a weird blunder that it's hard to tell at first if it
derails the song or just nudges it a bit. Several listens in, the song works
on the strength of its catchy "ba da ba da ba ba" passages and the
incredible verse melody, but that one little passage is awkward,
like the song has something stuck in its teeth. Death Cab opens the album
strongly with "Marching Bands of Manhattan", a song that feels like it's
constantly in the process of taking off, with pensive drumming and big,
sweeping vocals singing about sorrow seeping...
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