Chris Walla quit Death Cab for Cutie last year, which means he will never again be called the band's "secret weapon." His nuanced craftsmanship served as a buffer against Ben Gibbard’s increasingly broad and bland songwriting on recent LPs Narrow Stairs and Codes & Keys, but Walla "long[ed] for the unknown" and Gibbard felt the band was becoming stagnant and "self-referential". Though Walla contributes guitar and electronic collage to the band's eighth LP Kintsugi, he abdicates the producer’s role for the first time in the band’s history—in his stead is a proper big-budget pop guy, the preposterously and perfectly named Rich Costey (Muse, Foster the People, Chvrches). But it wouldn’t have mattered if DJ Mustard or Steve Albini produced Kintsugi: as with Codes & Keys, Gibbard promises reinvention and continues to play against his strengths without developing new ones.
Gibbard’s desire to write from a less personal standpoint is understandable, considering the widespread misunderstanding that any song in the first-person has to be autobiographical—his private life is a matter of public record these days, and surely he’s grown tired of having to clarify that wasn’t him eating Thanksgiving dinner in a suburban Denver Catholic church after dad bounced or treating that girl from Silver Lake like complete shit. But even when Gibbard was clearly writing in character, the sketches were personalized, and therein lay the genius of his work—he had an uncanny ability to see things as others might, penning deeply felt and detailed lyrics, willing to risk certain sentiments and awkward phrasings to reward the listener with a richer, more complex and relatable experience. They were someone’s stories. This is why Death Cab for Cutie played the KeyArena in Seattle and not, say, Matt Pond PA or Rogue Wave or any of their other peers from the "O.C. indie" era.
But Gibbard's change in approach hasn't coincided with a change of subject; Death Cab for Cutie has not developed a political conscience, nor is Gibbard suddenly experimenting with tone poems. The same relationship breakdowns and travelogues captured on The Photo Album have gone big screen as Gibbard strives for universal, one-feel-fits-all songs meant to be shared but not owned. Take "Little Wanderer", where the narrator (not Gibbard, y’all) is stuck at home and the girl is showing him pictures of her very commonplace vacation spots (Tokyo and Paris) through Messenger. Gibbard knows how to wring pathos out of long-distance relationships; he invented a damn word for it. He can also tease out how technological improvements in communication can leave even more unsaid. And yet, here’s the chorus: "You’re my wanderer, little wanderer/ Off across the sea/ You’re my wanderer, little wanderer/ Won’t you wander back to me?" It’s startling, almost amusing, to hear a hackneyed line like that cutting against the stonefaced sobriety of his delivery and plangent reverbed guitars—every pejorative stereotype of Death Cab becomes true for four minutes.
And yet Gibbard also indulges some explicit nostalgia for older Death Cab—during the climactic kiss in the baggage claim, the song reveals itself as basically fan-fic to the video for "A Movie Script Ending". This spark of recognition happens far too often on Kintsugi, resulting in songs that just sound like an impersonal reading of better ones from the past. Solo acoustic centerpiece "Hold No Guns" wants badly to be Kintsugi’s "I Will Follow You Into the Dark", but the narrator pleads harmlessness rather than "til death do us part and then some" devotion. "Binary Sea" makes a blatant metaphorical callback to the planetary myth-making of "Transatlanticism" and a number of previous weepy closers ("Stable Song", "A Lack of Color"). The lightly chiding tone and basic structure of "Your Heart Is an Empty Room" is reprised for "Everything’s a Ceiling"—little of Kintsugi gives the impression that Gibbard’s motivation to reboot Death Cab is matched by legitimate inspiration.
The newly luxurious production sets Costey up as a convenient scapegoat; "Everything’s a Ceiling" and "Good Help (Is So Hard to Find)" are the newest sounds here, and they recall the pop-funk Silly Putty of the 1975 or the Neighbourhood, both of whom are currently competing with Death Cab for KROQ spins. Otherwise, Kintsug**i sounds not altogether different than Plans, with Costey's chromed-out glossiness subbed in for Walla's fragile glassiness. Costey keeps Gibbard’s voice as high as possible in the mix, just as Walla would have; the sole exception is the distorted cloak on late-album highlight "Ingenue", which is the one track that makes good on Death Cab’s hope to integrate electronic influences like Flying Lotus and Jon Hopkins without just sounding like the Postal Service. In the context of the full album, this just feels like their latest well-meaning, but ultimately empty promise of a cred infusion (see also: Can, Brian Eno).
"Kintsugi" actually refers to a Japanese style of art where broken ceramics are fused together with gold, an apt metaphor but a weirdly honest one. And yet, when Kintsugi gets broken into individual pieces, there are heirlooms worth treasuring. Advance singles "No Room in Frame" and "The Ghosts of Beverly Drive" are where Gibbard remembers to write great Death Cab for Cutie songs the way he knows how—zooming on important specifics that speak on a larger idea, trying to make sense of newly formed concepts as he’s explaining them to someone else, rather than starting with the most broad, market-tested metaphors. Maybe it’s not Gibbard driving down I-5 through Fresno Valley, maybe it’s not him doomed to live with regrets in a city he still harbors resentments towards. It probably is, but at least Gibbard is willing to share some of himself while leaving plenty to the imagination. It also helps that these songs deliver Death Cab’s proprietary chorus melodies, winding, thrilling and sunlit like the Pacific Coast Highway of which Gibbard sings so fondly.
But I get it: Death Cab for Cutie have gone platinum, they’ve hit #1 on Billboard, they’ve been nominated for a Grammy and lost to "My Humps", they’ve played the former NBA arena in the city where they started and now they’ll play the Hollywood Bowl in Gibbard’s new home. If he’s straining to go against his instincts by writing self-explanatory songs like "Good Help (Is So Hard to Find)" and "You’ve Haunted Me All My Life" with equally pat arrangements and melodies, well, he’s got cheap seats to reach now. But after 12 years of hearing him repeat "I need you so much closer" ad infinitum, that line never hurt more than it does now.
