By Ryan Broderick
Death Cab For Cutie have easily cemented themselves as an indie-pop mainstay. With their last album, “Plans,” they successfully crossed over into the mainstream and sold the sound they had been creating for years before. Whether they made a poppier album or not is debatable, but after one listen of their newest album “Narrow Stairs,” any notions of catering to a poppy, radio audience are stomped out.
The hype for the album has been building steam since it was announced and it was only made more palpable after the band, in an April Fool’s joke, released a fake copy of the album to fans hoping for a leak. The album contained the single “I Will Possess Your Heart” and 10 other tracks by German band Velveteen. At first nobody noticed…. And since then, fans and critics alike have been dying to listen to where the predictably odd band would go with their seventh album.
The final product is an odd type of sound. If “Plans” could be summed up as where soul meets body, this newest effort rests comfortably at the place where pop sensibility meets art rock instrumentalism. The music around Ben Gibbard’s gentle croon flickers and chugs and bounces in midnight shades of gloom. Yet there’s something unmistakably catchy and simple about their songs.
Lyrically, Death Cab sits above its peers, offering listeners short stories of melancholy and self-realization instead of verse-chorus-repeat until bridge song structures. The structures of the songs on “Narrow Stairs” are odd, but they’re driven by simple refrains and lyrics that use (or hope) that less is more.
The core pieces of Death Cab For Cutie’s feedback, digi-delay ambience are still there, but whether it be the mixing or the songs themselves, there’s more of a fullness than on previous albums.
The most deliberate change in their sound is because of drummer Jason McGerr’s change in drumming style. Known for rhythmically complex off-time drumming, this time around he seems to be trying less for skill and more for precision. His drumming is mixed up and calmed down and it strengthens the backbones of the songs on “Narrow Stairs.” Instead of floating along, the tracks sound more human and palpable.
Death Cab For Cutie has the strange ability to change very little and yet at the same time, change everything. To someone new to the band, there doesn’t seem to be that much different with its sound. But it is a very different attitude and approach. And different isn’t always such a bad thing.
Death Cab For Cutie is back with 11 new songs and same old indie pop attitude. (sppedofdarkweb.com)