Word: gibbardã
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...California Zephyr,” a song about traveling on a Western railway, opens the album, and uses simple, sunny guitar and Ben Gibbard??s lighthearted vocals to set the expansive, American West scene. A rambling, pleasantly repetitive tune, “Zephyr” conveys a good sense of movement, as one can almost imagine peacefully sitting on the eponymous train, humming this tune as fields and hills stretch by. The chorus—“I’m transcontinental / 3,000 miles from home / I’m on the California Zephyr / watching America...
...Willamine” starts strong with Gibbard??s hauntingly high vocals and a lovely, purposeful piano. Disappointingly, though, these rich, heavy piano chords fail to lead into anything more than mere pseudo-romantic whining. With lyrics like “We’re gonna get married / we’re gonna fly away,” the song evidently aspires to be a sweeping ballad of young love, but winds up just sounding more like an anthem of teen angst...
...number of unskillful, uninspired songs demonstrate, the album’s collaborators largely failed at matching their individual musical strengths with the different moods of the album. Specifically, Gibbard??s sensitive and delicately emotive voice is best suited to melancholy and thoughtful melodies. By contrast, Farrar’s deeper, rougher twang enlivens gritty, hard-up tracks, but his nasally drawl drags down slower paced songs, making them sound whiny, not wistful. On the whole, this album, though fortified by a few well-crafted tracks, fails to adroitly engage its source text and the vocal talents...
...suggest that everyone had some fun making the video. Striking me rather like what Paul Klee might have created, had he been commissioned to make a music video, the imagery is at once bright and maudlin, working with a juxtaposition Death Cab knows all too well; the contrast between Gibbard??s often sorrowful lyrics and the bands poppy swing is a common theme, if not a steadfast rule, and stands out more than ever on “Crooked Teeth.”The video is devastatingly pretty, exuding effort from every scene, and well worth the wait...
...They get big distribution and decent promotion while still maintaining their indie credibility; they get immediate critical attention, but won’t be thrust so far into the limelight as to lose their private lives. And it’s not as though Death Cab, Ben Gibbard??s day job, has been a young upstart act anyway. These guys are old hands on the circuit, as close to an establishment as indie gets. (In fact, they just announced a new deal with Atlantic, so you can scratch the indie label entirely...