ROCK

"Narrow Stairs"

Autumn De Wilde (ENLARGE)
Lyrics seldom travel the familiar path with Death Cab for Cutie – Nick Harmer (from left) Ben Gibbard, Chris Walla and Jason McGerr.
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Death Cab for Cutie. Atlantic. 11 tracks.

Grade: A

They've been climbing steep stairs for years, so it's not all that surprising that with "Narrow Stairs," Death Cab For Cutie's time has truly come.

Glistening arrangements, melodies that are never mundane and penetrating lyrics all help to make this a milestone album for frontman Ben Gibbard and his DCFC accomplices.

Gibbard and the band have a rare knack for crafting music that's at times dark, but never droning and never dreary. They don't hesitate to take an unconventional approach, and nowhere is that more apparent than on the first single, "I Will Possess Your Heart."

It takes nearly five minutes until Gibbard's vocal finally arrives in a steady-building track that checks in at eight-minutes-plus. And when it does, he sings a tale that he has described as being "basically about a stalker," a haunting saga about someone who sees his own mirrored reflection in the windows of the woman with whom he's obsessed. Eerie is putting it mildly.

Lyrically, Death Cab for Cutie rarely take the familiar path. In "Grapevine Fires," Gibbard sings of a huge coastal wildfire with nearly apocalyptic implications, but contrasts those with images of picking up a friend and her daughter to drive to a cemetery on a hill, drink wine and watch the flames.

As they watched the "plumes paint the sky gray/She laughed and danced through the field of graves/And there I knew it would be all right/That everything would be all right."

That kind of vivid, contemplative imagery is far too rare these days, but DCFC has a knack for making the visions come alive, whether it's the bride, the hand me down wedding dress and flashbulbs popping in what's arguably the set's most gorgeous song, "Cath...," or the soul looking defeated in the slightly Western soundscape of "Your New Twin Sized Bed."

The thoughtfulness of the lyrics is matched and then some by the consistency of the music, which is sometimes dark but also carries pop echoes on songs such as "No Sunlight" and the Brian Wilson-tinged jingle-jangle of "You Can Do Better Than Me."

Eloquent, moving, and produced brilliantly by the band's guitarist and keyboardist Chris Walla, "Narrow Stairs" is an excursion into the mindtrain, into the mist and into the wild, a thrill ride for those looking for something to hang onto when everything else in life seems to have gone astray.

— Kevin O'Hare, Newhouse News Service