Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 4 / 5 Reviewer: Kevin Hartford |
2005 was a banner year for Death Cab for Cutie. They jumped from an independent label (Barsuk) to a major one (Atlantic), reached mainstream audiences through repeated mentions, musical cues, and an onscreen appearance in the hit television series The O.C., and released an album, Plans, that eventually sold over a million copies. 2005 was also the year Death Cab’s music went from being cool to something that was potentially embarrassing to be caught listening to, as long-term fans of the band struggled with the idea that they now possessed the same musical taste as a nation of undiscerning 13-year-old girls. In 2008, Death Cab released Narrow Stairs, which was featured prominently on Starbucks sales racks, hit the number-one position on the Billboard 200, and was their most uninspired album to date, which certainly didn’t help bring any of the band’s deserters back to the fold.
Codes and Keys might. It’s a quality record on par with Plans or 2003′s Transatlanticsm, which themselves were near-perfect efforts. Giving each song its own distinct personality and piling on the hooks is what made Death Cab so beloved in the first place, and that songwriting skill is in abundance here. The band has always been particularly good at putting the listener in a particular headspace at the beginning of a song and landing them somewhere completely different by the song’s end. ‘Unobstructed Views’ spends its first three minutes as an instrumental and its last three minutes as an urgent, piano-driven, percussion-heavy ballad. The album’s best track, ‘St. Peter’s Cathedral,’ starts out sparse, with single key tones and Gibbard’s vocals, and ends as something that wouldn’t be out of place on a record by Gibbard side project The Postal Service.
All of the songs on Codes and Keys are pretty catchy, but ‘Monday Morning,’ ‘Underneath the Sycamore’ and ‘Some Boys’ seem to capture that old Death Cab magic better than the rest. Only ‘Stay Young, Go Dancing’ and the title track feel like they could’ve used a little extra something. This album more than makes up for the lackluster Narrow Stairs, as well as helping diminish the horror of tweens knowing the lyrics to your favourite song.
