Leading up to Death Cab for Cutie's last record, 2008's Narrow Stairs, guitarist/producer Chris Walla claimed that they were taking inspiration from Brainiac and "heavy, sludgy, slow metal," and that the record contained a "10-minute long Can jam." But nothing on the record sounded remotely similar to those references; the jam in question, "I Will Possess Your Heart", actually ran a bit over eight minutes, and I don't think anyone mistook Ben Gibbard for Damo Suzuki. Leading up to the band's latest effort, Codes and Keys, the name-dropping returned, when Gibbard told SPIN that it was keyboard-heavy and "not guitar-based," citing Brian Eno's Another Green World as a hint of what to expect.
The claims of extended experimentation, though exaggerated, aren't as spurious this time around. Codes and Keys does sound different from the rest of the band's catalog. Soft pitter-pattered beats rustle underneath sparse melodies, while layers of extra instrumentation are placed atop already-busy arrangements. Two songs (the metronomic "Doors Unlocked and Open" and the unmoored piano meditation "Unobstructed Views") run well over the five-minute mark; swaths of gentle noise surround even the most straightforward cuts. If you come to this record looking for something as directly engaging as "Cath..." or "I Will Follow You Into the Dark", you're going to walk away empty-handed.
Death Cab still sound like Death Cab, but Codes and Keys is undoubtedly the least "pop" record they've made since breaking through to the mainstream with their last indie-situated effort, 2003's Transatlanticism. So there's new territory for the band explored here, and Walla, along with mixing maestro Alan Moulder, applies a label-money sheen that provides a decent frame for the record's sonic idiosyncrasies. But for a band so identified with exploring feelings and the details of relationships, the record comes off as chilly, diffident, and emotionally distant. The texture-heavy excursions ("Doors Unlocked and Open", "Unobstructed Views", "St. Peter's Cathedral") are adrift and without direction, while early singles "You Are a Tourist" and "Underneath the Sycamore" sound like generic versions of the band from an earlier era.
Indeed, even when the band revisits past glories on Codes and Keys' few highlights, Death Cab weirdly sound like they are imitating themselves. They borrow the baroque Brian Wilson-isms of Narrow Stairs' "You Can Do Better Than Me" for "Portable Television", copy the upward-moving bridge of The Photo Album's "I Was a Kaleidoscope" for the same structural change in "Monday Morning", and lift the basic structure of Plans opener "Marching Bands of Manhattan" for "Underneath the Sycamore". Anyone who's spent the last decade following along will get some warm fuzzies from these flashes of familiarity, but they tend to get stale with repeat listens.
The rudderless quality might owe something to the album's sporadic recording process-- eight different studios were employed, and the members of Death Cab rarely sound like they're in the same room together. Most remote of all is Gibbard. His vocals are frequently treated with effects, creating an alienating space that, excepting the moony-eyed closing hymn "Stay Young, Go Dancing", robs him of his trademark intimacy. Lyrically, he largely plays it safe, engaging in nonsensical rhymes ("When you scream/ Love you seem") and sweeping declarative generalizations. Gibbard's evocative narratives and incisive commentary, always overlooked with this band, are mostly missing.
Over the last decade, both Death Cab and the landscape around them have changed considerably; while they've signed to a major label and topped the charts, the sensitive-guy Pac NW indie rock archetype they launched a decade ago has receded from the conversation. Another sound that Gibbard had a hand in introducing, however, still reverberates: the gentle, electronic bedroom-pop that he and producer Jimmy Tamborello made as the Postal Service. Those sounds never really infiltrated Death Cab until now, but Codes and Keys doesn't approach that project's level of emotional engagement. Here, Death Cab sound miles apart from each other and, ultimately, from us.
