Is Death Cab for Cutie still relevant? It’s been six years since the band released “I Will Follow You into the Dark” and everyone you knew began to sing it at coffeehouses and you scrawled Fear is the heart of love onto your sneakers in permanent marker. Ben Gibbard now seems a bit like a caricature of the “sensitive indie” of the 2000s that has decidedly been cast aside, for better or worse. After the quartet hit their stride with 2003’s Transatlanticism and 2005’s Plans, they left me disinterested with Narrow Stairs (2008) and they just now seem to be rebounding. However, the question remains: does anyone still care?
Codes and Keys oscillates between claustrophobia and sheer bliss throughout its 45 minutes of play. In the first half of the album, Gibbard lyrically hits upon themes of paranoia, isolation and a vague longing for freedom, with the only real outlier being “Some Boys.” As the album progresses, there’s a definite sense of yearning: Gibbard describes “feeling like a tourist in the city you were born” and “searching everywhere for a homeland.”
Codes goes on to present us with gleeful ballads full of love and hope that could make any listener forget the elegies of Death Cab’s earlier works. There are some undeniably lame rhymes scattered throughout, unfortunately (“We are the same, we are both saved”; “When you scream, love you seem”). These vacuous little blobs serve only to detract from what could be a compelling set of lyrics. It would help if Gibbard would ground the album in a story, give us someone to root for or against, so we’re not blindly led through his mood swings and ultimately left picturing Zooey Deschanel during the love songs.
Death Cab is still grounded in the acoustic pop-rock of prior records while striving for a new sound heard in the pithy, electronic-driven “Some Boys” (which recalls LCD Soundsystem’s “Drunk Girls,” instrumentally and lyrically). This push in a new direction suits them well and really seems like a natural progression, not a seventh-album slump. “Doors Unlocked and Open,” “Monday Morning” and “Underneath the Sycamore” are satisfying hybrids of Death Cab’s two competing sounds (and if you’re not going to bother with the whole album, listen to these three). I really wish they would get weirder, though. Gibbard is right on the precipice of something funky and electronic that might just freak everyone out enough to give Death Cab a broader fan base and a breath of new life.
Just when you begin to get tired of Codes, Gibbard knocks you off your feet with the spacy, fuzzy “Unobstructed Views” and the gorgeous opening of “Underneath the Sycamore”: “Lying in a field of glass / Underneath the overpass / Mangled in the shards of a metal frame / Woken from the dream by my own name.”
Here’s the thing: I’m rooting for Death Cab. There are some holes in Codes and Keys that can’t be overlooked, but I want you to like this album, if for no other reason than its utter hopefulness. Some listeners, myself included, have pushed Death Cab aside in the past few years in favor of other music that challenged us more, or pushed the envelope, or made us dance. This band is an old standby for many of us, and that didn’t happen by accident.
At its best, Codes and Keys is stunning; at its worst, it’s too reminiscent of the band’s previous work. Give it a shot. During “Stay Young, Go Dancing,” Codes and Keys’ last track, close your eyes. “Life is sweet in the belly of the beast.” •
