Oh Death Cab. How I loved you in your pensive, strange We Have the Facts… days, before Transatlanticism was shouted out all over “The O.C.” and before the Postal Service made Ben Gibbard the indie rock phenom and cash cow that he has become. And oh, how I disliked Plans and its lack of real depth, lack of the lyrics that made Ben Gibbard what he always was – an incredible storyteller, and how it seemed that Chris Walla suddenly became perfectionist and overpolished on that record (perhaps because his producer side coming out?).
But lo! What is this? Narrow Stairs feels like old school Death Cab, all backbeat drums and antimelodic pianos and strange melodies becoming a tapestry on which Gibbard weaves his heartbroken storybook.
Oh, I like it. I like it a lot.
I did not like the first single, which has now charted on VH1 (!!!) “I Will Possess Your Heart” until I heard the non-edited version, which begins with almost five minutes of instrumental buzzing, and a weird, paranoid build which creates a mood and context for the lyrics. The music swells, and then when Gibbard’s voice starts, it crawls back to a lull of simple tones while Gibbard goes stalker-creepy with lyrics like:
There are days when outside your window, I see my reflection as I slowly pass
And I long for this mirrored perspective, when we’ll be lovers, lovers at last
You gotta spend some time–love, you gotta spend some time with me
And I know that you’ll find–love, I will possess your heart
You reject my advances and desperate pleas
I won’t let you, let me down so easily, so easily
It’s just perfect, completely perfect, and its too bad the radio edit ruins it and turns it into something far too catchy and poppy. Full version:
Download the better version of I Will Possess Your Heart
“You Can Do Better Than Me” is catchy and poppy in a 50s Beach Boys sort of way, a sound I can’t remember the band ever experimenting with:
It works, though because the mood of the whole album is dark and claustrophobic (you get that album title now?), it works in its modern way, and the sweet refrain “You can do better than me / But I can’t do better than you” ends the song with just pianos. It’s funny that I’ve mentioned the Beach Boys because California (well, okay, Kerouac) is all over this album. And though Death Cab have spoken of California before (the LA hipster haven neighborhood of Silverlake got name-checked on Transatlanticism while Los Angeles itself got an entire song devoted to how crap it was which I mentioned in my post on Los Angeles). But on Narrow Stairs, not only are they channeling the Beach Boys, Death Cab are singing about Bixby Bridge (in Big Sur, which is, I guess, an homage to Kerouac’s Big Sur) and describing wildfires tearing through vineyards in “Grapevine Fires,” hands down one of the most beautiful Death Cab songs ever, about a woman and a man and a child, running twhile a fire closes in:
“Closing in” is a big theme of this album, and the idea that as things close in on you, sometimes you get further away from what you want.
The only place where the album goes a little awry for me is on “Long Division,” which has a fantastic melody but features, um, math puns. Lots of math puns. But is still lovely and catchy as hell and even with the stupid math puns had me bouncing around my living room yelling “Without a remain, remain, remain, remainder!”
“Your New Twin-Sized Bed” is also a little weak, but frankly I don’t care. The portraits of heartbreak on this album are achingly and lovingly painted, and while the portrait may not be comfortable to look at, it sure is spot on. Each song features (seemingly) a different narrator who all share a similar sense of lovelorn hopelessness. The songs connect like a novel (for example, coming directly after the “remainder” refrain of “Long Division” is this couplet from “Pity and Fear,” “If you can’t stand in place you can’t tell who’s walking away / From who remains, who stays, who stays, who stays,” which made the LitGeek in me go “Ooooh! Parallelism!” I’ll leave the rest of the interpretation of this very literary album to you, dear readers, if you so wish, but if you prefer to just let this lovely album wash over you, I think you can do that as well. It ends with a sort of non-ending. “The Ice is Getting Thinner” just stops, as if the narrator has silently slipped under, and it is heartbreaking, but somehow completely fitting, a finalized slam-shut of a book.
Oh, band. My band. You are back! I am no longer embarrassed to have a silk screen of one of your concerts up on my wall! I hope that with Postal Service and Ben Gibbard and Chris Walla’s solo work that you aren’t slamming your book together shut, because when you’re good, you’re very very good.
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