Death Cab for Cutie: I Built You A Tower

I did not particularly enjoy this album. Which, to be fair, is the first of Death Cab’s albums I’ve fucked with since 2011’s Keys and Codes. That’s a long stretch to ignore a band that I once liked very much. Bummer I came back in on Gibbard’s divorce record. Never a great place to come back into a band’s oeuvre. Especially when that band already trended sad boy. Granted, it’s not like I wouldn’t have won quite a bit on Kelshi had I bet the over on the word “heart” being uttered X amount of times during the album’s progression. Dude can’t help being who he is.

The thing is, DCFC has started to almost sound like a parody of itself. Like the SNL sketch of the twee Northwest middle-aged dad band. Not as drab as The National, no, but tired (a word that Gibbard uses almost as much as “heart”) in a pretty unappealing way. Well, unappealing to those of us who aren’t looking for a giant sigh of a record. Even when they amp it up a little and producer John Congleton pushes the levels, there’s something rote about the effort. As if Gibbard is catching himself tunelessly moping and needs to shake himself out of it. Or the band is looking crossways at him begging for just a little energy that doesn’t lean on his samey samey melodies and cadence.

All this and I have no idea what kind of journey the dude has been on for the past 15 years. I honestly stopped caring about him after his divorce from Zooey Deschanel. He must be crazy or stupid. But it seems he married and divorced another person in the interim, which may have apparently re-sparked his musical engine. I vaguely recall the band doing more electronic stuff in there in the intervening years between divorces. So maybe this downturn in his personal life is actually good for his creativity. Which seems to mostly be going back to the future. Because, yes, you can hear the old DCFC in here. But in a kind of uncanny way. Like I said, it feels at times like someone doing a send up of Death Cab rather than the band itself. And then occasionally stepping on a guitar pedal and letting the drummer go to town. They haven’t gotten “Shiny Happy People” on us, but we get “Pep Talk,” which flirts with that shit. But in tones of DCFC. Maybe I’m just old. Or maybe they’re just old. Or maybe the time for this sad dad rock has had its day and moved along. And sure I know I’m way too old to be listening to the post-hardcore kids that I do, but it’s like I either need things to be dangerous or alt-country and just can’t do this middle ground anymore.