Death Cab For Cutie’s latest record, Kintsugi, is available everywhere records are sold.
“You may tire of me as our December sun is setting/I’m not who I used to be…” –Death Cab For Cutie “Brothers on a Hotel Bed”
The above lyric is one of my favorites ever uttered by Death Cab For Cutie frontman Benjamin Gibbard. That line is from the penultimate track off of the band’s fifth album, 2005’s Plans.
For my money, Plans is the band’s best record, a 44:25 ride through the entire human emotional gamut, that builds a solid, yet down-tempo, foundation as it plods along. That album will be celebrating its tenth birthday this August, and no doubt will be lauded for its staying power.
Plans was the band’s first foray into a new world of major-label notoriety and all of the power and might that comes with an Atlantic Records imprint. C’mon right; this is the label of Ahmet Ertegun, Otis Redding, CSNY, and Peter Gabriel–a label with lineage like that certainly isn’t the minor leagues.
What resulted was a smoldering 11-song set of tunes that had an overarching theme of yearning for something that was once there but had now up and left. At 17-going-on-18, this album spoke volumes to the impending transition to college, pomp, and circumstance of the months that lay ahead.
And yes, it was almost certainly a breakup album. (Aren’t all of the important records of one’s teen years in that vein?) It was the soundtrack to the beautiful melancholy that is high school-marinated love, as songs like the quoted-above Brothers on a Hotel Bed and I Will Follow You Into The Dark were undoubtedly love songs, but different than anything else I had heard before it.
It was love at first listen. Plans was one of a handful of albums I brought to college with me, and it’s been within my reach for most of the time ever since.
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Fast-forward almost ten years later and Death Cab For Cutie has just recently released Kintsugi, the band’s eighth studio effort. From the album’s title, deriving from the Japanese art of threading in gold leaf to display fractures and fissures in once-broken pottery, is most clearly a breakup album centering mostly on Gibbard’s divorce from actress Zooey Deschanel. Songs like album starter No Room in Frame, Ingenue, and Good Help (Is So Hard To Find) certainly give the album a geographic timestamp of Los Angeles and time spent there.
Gibbard puts his heart on his sleeve when he writes and that broken, yet, not defeated heart is on display throughout the lyrics of this record. That was something indebted to longtime Gibbard friend and collaborator, Jenny Lewis, no stranger to letting your emotions hang out there on a record, as her 2014 smash The Voyager has evidenced.
“She told me, ‘Don’t change how you go about your business for fear of somebody correctly or incorrectly placing a face on these songs,’ ” Gibbard said to both the Los Angeles Times and Grantland’s Andy Greenwald. ” ‘Go right into it.’ And I think I did.”
(From L-R) Drummer Jason McGerr, Frontman Ben Gibbard, and bass player Nick Harmer.
That sheer lack of editing emotions and feelings regardless of listeners having a face and name in their mind of the ingénue in question is what has powered Kintsugi to its heights. New producer Rich Costey (who took over principal production after departing guitar player/pianist/producer extraordinaire Chris Walla) brings the band’s sound out from previous lived-in shadows and into stereo.
Listening to Kintsugi’s predecessor, Codes and Keys, is sort of a different experience now. Codes and Keys is the summer fling soundtrack that doesn’t see the public, messy breakup wreckage coming, whereas Kintsugi is the soundtrack to the period of assessing the wreckage between the break-up and subsequent move on down the road.
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Where does Plans fit when analyzing Death Cab for Cutie’s latest record? Thematically, Gibbard has rediscovered that same lyrical groove squarely situated between the sweet melancholy of it all.
As a listener, I can’t help but feel like both Plans and Kintsugi feel like similar albums soundtracking similar-feeling times. Plans was the soundtrack of knocking on the door to one’s twenties and growing up in the face of moving different and new, while Kintsugi is the soundtrack of realizing that you got there and now have to put the pieces back together of things left in the wake of that journey.
Be it the collegiate breakup smack dab in the middle of that semester that seemed to never end, or the romantic misfire in your mid-twenties, both albums have the same therapeutic quality–that a spin through a decent set of headphones can get you on the path to maybe one day, someday, getting past it and growing up.
Candid Cameron 