The marching drum of a career a'drums, a'drums, a'drums in all of us. And we, the people, ever march on so obediently to our faithful callings. From high school, like gazing off a cliff on the west coast out at the endless Pacific Ocean, the world is filled with an endless amount of opportunity. Everyone knows, staring at those western waters, that Japan, China, Australia, Hawaii, Russia, and the rest of the world rests over a few thousand miles of sea. In our lives, our options lay as vast and as open as the Pacific. Where we go, what we do, well that's just up to us.
Musicians face a shoddy, trampled, rough road to trod down. It's not easy to be a rock star in this post-Y2K society, though in essence, it never has been a breeze. Making a name for yourself to record labels, and then gaining street credibility has always been tough; the task is only more cumbersome in our disconnected, intangible superconnection with endless Myspace accounts of would-be troubadours coming and going on a daily basis. Creativity is not a commodity sold at Wal-Mart, and touring is one of the most difficult processes, physically, mentally, and monetarily. To be a successful band is to overcome many, many obstacles that your average desk job won't be dishing out.
But there are veterans amongst the throng of up-and-coming stars, who have influenced music for years; whom are role models for aforementioned would-be's; who's sound has evolved as many times as they have put out an album. Those veterans are Death Cab for Cutie, who put out Something About Airplanes an entire decade ago. The band which has helped bourgeon the talents of Ben Gibbard; the band that has helped develop one of the brightest producers in the music scene, Chris Walla; the band which has slowly defined love with each of their six studio albums. Or maybe they have made love more confusing; one can never tell.
But once again, after all the years, the humble quartet has produced their seventh and latest studio release, Narrow Stairs. Death Cab's music has remained progressive throughout the years of their tenure in the music scene, and the subtle transitions in their sound are audible - almost tangible - in their latest release.
"When we recorded Plans, it was our first major label record, and I think it was a very surgical process," dummer Jason McGerr says on the phone, during Death Cab's documentary, Open Windows, for Current TV. "We really took time to, y'know, groom the whole thing. And this record was a little more like rolling into work with bedhead. If there a little flub, or little twist, or a little turn, or a little bit of a bend here or there in a performance, we signed off on it - we were okay with it... If it feels good, it's good enough to make the record."
Death Cab's style had a prominent shift from Transatlanticism to Plans. Whereas Transatlanticism boasted a more quiet, harmonious, but sociable shift from their previous endeavours on The Photo Album, Plans touted a strange, new Death Cab; a much more matured sound (which says a lot for those who know Death Cab's discography) which leaned toward quiet and sad tunes; toward lamentations rather than explanations. The observance to detail put into Plans was very noticeable, and surely an invigorating change.
But with the release of Narrow Stairs, Death Cab's sound has progressed to a more humbled, personal sound - a quiet, yet pronounced happiness - while retaining a realist perspective that is drifting in the dreams of an idealist. Narrow Stairs opens at a whisper with "Bixby Canyon Bridge," inspired by a very Kerouac style of self-discovery. The song quietly whistles into the ear before it explodes in a vast, heavily layered landscape of sound that nears dream-like status.
"I Will Possess Your Heart," Narrow Stairs' first single, follows as the second track, and by far the best song, which sets the experimental style Death Cab preaches for the rest of the album. The edited versions of this song do it no justice, as the album version launches with a four minute long instrumental intro, slowly building into a deafening, dissonant crescendo, then falling back so close to silence before re-texturing back to a reverberating brilliance. "The song just unfolded as we were playing together," says Ben Gibbard in his interview for Open Windows. "And everybody was kind of just finding themselves in the song... By the time the song turns into this juggernaut, everybody's just moving forward... with this fervour that I feel like we earned as the song keeps building, and building..."
After the buzz of the speakers quiets at the end of track two, the album launches forth into a steady stream of excellently composed songs. "No Sunlight" allows Death Cab for Cutie to flex their muscles with some of their pop tendencies, while the backhanded compliments of "You Can Do Better Than Me" are like an awkward antonym to "What Sarah Said" from Plans. "Grapevine Fires" takes listeners to the west coast, with cultural references of the California grass fires. Nostalgia lingers in songs like "Cath..." which brings reminders of "We Laugh Indoors" from The Photo Album, while the album's finale, "The Ice Is Getting Thinner," takes listeners back to "20th Century Towers" from Death Cab's Stability EP.
The musical composition throughout Narrow Stairs shifts from fast to slow - quiet to loud - soft to heavy - back and forth, throughout the entire length of the album. Ben Gibbard's lyrics play with love, veering away from the clichéd and tweaked view, and instead toying with a realistic, matter-of-fact sort of love. "I've always been interested in lionizing the small moments in life... in my own little way, I've tried to do that," says Gibbard. "The vast majority of life is... not very profound, so you kind of have to try to find find a little profundity in the more mundane elements of life. And I think that tends to be the more interesting."
As these veterans a'drum, a'drum, a'drum away to their musical career, their ingenuity filling our speakers, we can take a deep breath, and hope life will make just a little more sense. Narrow Stairs is now available to in stores and on the internet now, and our favourite minstrels are currently touring stateside, straight through the summer, until August. Death Cab for Cutie's latest album is different; a glorious exclamation of life in its simplest form, expressed in the most complex way one can express such a mind-bogglingly confusing event. Death Cab shows that they don't have a few cards up their sleeve, but a whole deck that they're waiting to deal in an excellent hand.
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