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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...
...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...
...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...
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...
MIKE WAGERS, taxi driver whose suspicions led police to capture a couple who claimed, during a 115-mile cab ride, to be headed to an Amway convention in Columbus, Ohio, but turned out to be an escaped prisoner and his wife, who that day had killed a guard during her husband's transfer to another penitentiary in Tennessee...