keepers 3
keeper avg .272
Death Cab's fourth album starts with "The New Year"*****, which combines slashing guitars and Jason McGerr's busy, "Sunday Bloody Sunday"-like drum work in dramatic fashion. Juxtaposing complexity and powerful gestures, it exemplifies the best elements of indie/emo songwriting, though the song's meaning seems banal and vague. The aptly-named "Lightness" provides a welcome gentle, low-key respite. "Title And Registration" is the album's weakest lyric, ridiculously observing:
The glove compartment is inaccurately named And everybody knows it
So I'm proposing a swift orderly change 'Cause behind its door, there's nothing to keep my fingers warm...
before settling into melancholy end of relationship whinging.
The humorously ironic pop-rock single "The Sound Of Settling"**** starts the album's strong middle section, followed by one of the album's strongest lyrics, the bluntly confessional "Tiny Vessels" (you are beautiful but you don't mean a thing to me). The epic title song***** relentlessly builds from a somber piano ballad to a crunchy guitar catharsis as Ben Gibbard pleads "I need you so much closer". This amazing moment is followed by "Passenger Seat", a quiet piano figure which should have been the album's contemplative closing coda. Instead the album is ended with the much weaker "A Lack Of Color", which declares:
"All the girls in every gillie magazine Can't make me feel any less alone, I'm reaching for the phone" (that's not really what they're for). The album is filled-out by mid-tempo filler "Expo '86" and "Death Of An Interior Decorator", and "We Looked Like Giants", featuring an intimate account of your average young-adult relationship over some overly-urgent rocking, just another day at the office for an circa-2K emo band.
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