Release Date: May 31, 2011
To your dad, that’s a pound sign on cover of Death Cab for Cutie’s Codes & Keys. Generation Y-Not knows it by a more esoteric name, one that might make Dad think his kid’s a stoner. If the symbols in everyday life have taken on new meaning, so have Death Cab For Cutie’s songs, which aren’t so much about domestic happiness as the peace that comes with settling down.
Death Cab for Cutie’s last and best album, Narrow Stairs, succeeded because it was so sneaky; bold without sounding like it. That record’s best moment can go unnoticed to untrained ears: “I Will Possess Your Heart” needed just two words to completely turn the accompanying verse on its head. Ben Gibbard, the anti-rock star with that golden honey voice, added “just yet” to the line about books written “in a language that you can’t read.”
There aren’t many of those mind games on Codes & Keys, and Gibbard and Co. step back whenever the momentum builds. The result is the high-and-dry listening experience of the year.
“Unobstructed Views” is a half instrumental in the vein of Death Cab’s best work, but elsewhere the band seems tentative. With its Joy Division-esque bass line and kinetic drumming, “Doors Unlocked and Open” threatens to delve into a meaty Krautrock jam but stays far enough from the cliff’s edge to keep it from really getting interesting. Sometimes the blame is squarely on Gibbard: even on the musically superb “Some Boys” (as in “some boys don’t know how to love”), he just sounds smarmy, like your girlfriend’s close guy pal who may or may not want her for himself. There’s no smirk needed, because you can picture him doing it with his eyes.
Even if the music isn’t that interesting, the musicianship is razor sharp. First single “You Are a Tourist” has a glitchy start with clipped guitar that serves to remind why Death Cab easily courted a major label (Chris Walla’s dewy production never hurts). The track’s dizzy jangle and cotton-balled piano underscores Gibbard’s lyrics: “Sometimes the best intentions are in need of redemption/Don’t you agree?/If so, please show me.”
There are clear redeeming parts to Codes & Keys. “She may be young but she only likes old things/Today’s music isn’t to her taste,” he sings with a smile on “Monday Morning,” as if bestowing his approval on a new generation of geeky high school students just discovering Meat Is Murder for the first time.
“When she sings, I hear a symphony/And I’m swallowed in sound,” his voice hovers above the swirly acoustic guitar in the joie de vivre closer “Stay Young Go Dancing.” This is going to be somebody’s wedding song.
Gibbard excels at writing a really specific type of song in the past tense. In these scenarios, he empathetically recounts in second person how something didn’t go as planned for the protagonist, detailing the emotional aftermath that ensued.
But Death Cab for Cutie’s latest album, Codes & Keys, is more about the present than the past—analyzing “what is” over “what if?” Those satisfied with the present rarely question the past.
“What now” is what fans will ask. The band’s recent string of albums showed them pushing hard toward subgenre mastery. 2003’s Transatlanticism was melancholy and infinite sadness in one. Their Atlantic debut Plans brought more hooks than a meat locker while the followup Narrow Stairs stretched out in the extra space that major label semi-experimentalism offers. Codes & Keys, however, finds the band in a holding pattern, a few interesting things here (“Some Boys”) and there (“Monday Morning”) but nothing essential. It’s not surprising if the songs sound more settled than the dares from recent albums. If the band’s major changes in their personal lives—marriages, kids—have any influence (and it’s likely they do), stasis sounds good right about now.
The songs on Codes & Keys are nowhere nearly as good as the brisk propeller pop of Plans or the arresting, damaged beauty of Narrow Stairs. But if the album stops short of warranting “because it’s Death Cab” auto-praise, it’s still worth more than a couple hash tags.
Death Cab for Cutie – Codes & Keys Tracklist:
- “Home Is a Fire”
- “Codes and Keys”
- “Some Boys”
- “Doors Unlocked and Open”
- “You Are a Tourist”
- “Unobstructed Views”
- “Monday Morning”
- “Portable Television”
- “Underneath the Sycamore”
- “St. Peter’s Cathedral”
- “Stay Young, Go Dancing”
