Major Label, Minor Key

By Josh Tyrangiel

Over the course of four albums and innumerable appearances inside the heads of characters on The O.C., the Seattle-based quartet Death Cab for Cutie has established itself as the go-to band for a particular kind of postadolescent melancholy. The standard Death Cab song, sung in the earnest and always reasonable voice of Ben Gibbard, hews to the belief that the world is big and tough, that we are small and bruise easily--so let's stay small, stay together and hope for the best.

If you hadn't guessed by now, Death Cab for Cutie can be as precious as a unicorn on a Hello Kitty T shirt. That makes the band's new album, Plans, out Aug. 30, one of the more intriguing arrivals of the summer. Death Cab's previous records peaked at respectable low-to-mid six figures on Barsuk Records, an independent label so tiny that it gets most of its mail at a P.O. box. With Plans, the band moves to the hulking multinational Atlantic, and even though big record companies are in danger of mismanaging themselves into irrelevance, the major-label debut remains an important marker in a group's development, kind of like a rock-'n'-roll Bar Mitzvah. There's a big stage, lots of buzz, some singing and, if everything goes well, checks with impossibly large numbers waiting at the end.

But there's also supposed to be some evidence of maturity, and at least in this regard Plans tries way too hard. Gibbard, who writes all Death Cab's lyrics, spends a lot of time waxing nostalgic for a past that wasn't that long ago (Summer Skin, Someday You Will Be Loved), and when he looks to the future, he sees mostly death. I Will Follow You into the Dark opens with "Love of mine, someday you will die." What Sarah Said is set in an ICU "that reeked of piss and 409" and espouses the yearbook wisdom that "love is watching someone die." Gibbard pitches most of his morbidity in an assuring middle range; he doesn't sound like he's singing so much as throwing an arm around your shoulder and advising, like a high schooler playing the prematurely wise friend. It does not add to the appeal.

What makes Plans bearable--and sometimes even better than that--is extremely tight music. Death Cab's previous albums were always listenable but rarely arresting or tense. On Plans, the hooks are everywhere. Someday You Will Be Loved starts like a standard ballad until an exaggerated bass line kicks up during the first verse and gentle chaos begins. Marching Bands of Manhattan builds from a single keyboard chord into something joyful enough to counter the repetitions of "your love is gonna drown." On Crooked Teeth, each instrument plays a line that, isolated, could be the basis for its own hit. The melodies are hard to get out of your head, but the thoughts they carry are only pretend deep. Just in time for the new season of The O.C. --By Josh Tyrangiel