Toronto - Oh Ben Gibbard, your soft voice and softer sound have made moody adolescents swoon for nearly a decade now and while most casual fans anxiously await a second Postal Service album (or even a tour), you choose to continue with your original band - Death Cab For Cutie. That’s damn loyal. 2008 brings another DCFC album - Narrow Stairs.
After several listens, my opinion of this album is a bit meh. It sounds pretty much what I expected, only more mellow. I guess this comes with age, but when you are Death Cab, you can only be that laid back, anymore and you would fall over due to gravity. I guess this album has what is called a ’stripped down sound’. Very high on the vocals, with the amps on the instruments turned to ‘5′. There are very few tunes (”Long Division”, “Pity and Fear”) that will have you bobbing your head, maybe thats intentional, since most Death Cab fans probably spend hours in front of the mirror getting their hair just right, you don’t want to ruin that for a potentially danceable tune.
The lyrics for this album remain truly Death Cab, and I can totally see teenagers writing something like
These times I think of leaving
But it’s something I’ll never do
‘Cause you can do better than me
But I can’t do better than you
to each other. I enjoyed their last album - Plans, more then this one. I dunno, Ben Gibbard’s vocal range is fairly limited so any time you layer his voice, with his distinctive lyrics on top of some mellow music - you pretty much get a Death Cab song. That’s pretty much what you get with this album, and maybe because theres been six other albums already, its hard to get all excited about something that sounds pretty much the same, but slightly different. Having Pity and Fear cut off seemingly mid song is rather annoying too.
Death Cab For Cutie joins powers with Stars for “Indie Chick Fest 2008″ on the Island June 7 and tickets are around 56$.
