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Death Cab for Cutie Review
"The experience was more transcendental than transatlantic, with lead singer Ben Gibbard’s voice echoing with pain, without leaving me depressed."
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By Rachel Krantz
The first time I heard Death Cab for Cutie was on their popular Tranatlanticism album. The experience was more transcendental than transatlantic, with lead singer Ben Gibbard’s voice echoing with pain, without leaving me depressed. It’s one of those albums that doesn’t have to grow on you. I liked Transatlanticism on the first listen. Unfortunately, the same can’t quite be said for Death Cab’s follow up album, ‘Plans’.
Maybe drawn to the similarity between the name of their breakthrough album and Atlantic, their new mainstream label, Death Cab changed plans and left their independent label.
The first single off of Plans, “Soul Meets Body” is perhaps the album’s most upbeat track, drawing on the nearly techno beats of Gibbard’s other successful band, The Postal Service.
Perhaps the most sincere track on Plans is the unlikely lullaby “I will follow you into the dark”. The song is a good example of Gibbard’s lyrics standing on their own with only an acoustic guitar as background. The song, which was spontaneously recorded when Gibbard started playing during a break in a studio session, is raw and refreshingly under-produced.
”I will follow you” caught my attention on the first listen and grew on me even more the second time around. Other tracks, such as the late Elliot-Smith-style waltz, “Someday you will be loved” are equally heartbreaking.
But “Plans” can at times be over planned. The track “What Sarah said” starts out predictably enough as the inevitable rock-band-tribute-to-the-friend-who-overdosed, but digresses into an overproduced song that repeats its last line, “So who’s going to watch you die?” so many times that melodramatic would be an understatement.
But just because Death Cab is starting to live up to its dark name with “Plans” doesn’t mean the album won’t make you a fan. This group of guys even wants to understand the existential meaning of a summer fling. And sometimes, that kind of charming obsessive-ness can make a great song.
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