Death Cab for Cutie
Transatlanticism
Barsuk

The fear always lingers at the back of a music fan's mind — fear that proliferation will eventually prompt an artist to shift from brilliance to shit. Death Cab for Cutie's frontman, Benjamin Gibbard, is one of those artists who keeps his fans wondering if his next step will be the one to send him teetering twixt rim and bowl.

Regardless of how it's expressed, 2003 has been a busy year for Gibbard. In addition to releasing records and touring extensively with his vastly popular side project, The Postal Service, Gibbard also has played a slew of solo shows and contributed three stripped-down original tracks to a split EP with American Analog Set's Andrew Kenny.

You'd think so much activity would cause a slow leak in the tire of talent. At the very least, you'd expect — for an artist whose lyrics tend to resemble finely wrought short stories more than songs — that the muse would be nearly wrung dry by now. But on Transatlanticism, Death Cab's latest outing, Gibbard proves that one of the things that makes him such a good songwriter is his consistency. He's canvassed the musical world with songs that are, almost without exception, strong — songs that brim with pithiness, melodies that shoot through the psyche and have listeners humming the phantom refrains for days. Sad but easy to sing along to, any given track packs a wide range of emotions into a single three-and-a-half-minute pop song.

"Death of an Interior Decorator," for example, is a song about single motherhood with hi-hats that sound like coins shaken in the palm of your hand, bass notes encased in grit and guitars that wind and chime, choking your heart as Gibbard narrates:

They tenderly kissed then cut the cake/ The bride then tripped and broke the vase/ the one you thought would spend the years/ so perfectly placed below the mirror/ Arriving late, you cleaned the debris/ and walked into the angry sea.

All of Death Cab's albums have been recorded and produced by the band's guitarist, Chris Walla. Though there has been little deviation in song structure over the years, Walla's technical ability has grown exponentially with each, which may be the impetus for the band's increased popularity and accessibility. Though there are quite a few slinking, introspective tracks on Transatlanticism, there are also a fistful of songs that have the left-field appeal — not quite punk, not quite rock, not quite pop — that brought a song like Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle" to the top of the charts in recent years.

Take "The Sound of Settling," which starts like a simple statement and then explodes into the bold, exclamatory chorus of "Ba-ba, this is the sound of settling." The song, though, is devoid of grating angst that most groups use to perk up their audiences' ears. The instruments don't need to be cranked because the feeling expressed is innate in the arrangement, crystalline production and progression from note to note, verse to chorus. The sound is clean and subdued enough that a listener has to sit up and take notice. It seems only fair that a song of such magnitude would prod Billboard's upper peaks, leaving the lyrics to be markered on to every odd preteen's backpack or the smudged rubber toes of their well-worn Chuck Taylors.

Even if Transatlanticism fails to propel Death Cab to such great heights of popularity, it testifies to the band's greatness and reassures Death Cab devotees that a plunge into shit is unlikely anytime soon.

— Michael Seidel (michael@alsatia.net)