have never really listened to Death for Cutie extensively, but for some reasons I have been listening to their last one, ‘Codes and Keys’, for a few days now, mostly because I really liked the title song. Yes, this syncopated piano-bar rhythm running whilst the plaintive string orchestral arrangement is beautifully agonizing behind Gibbard’s vocals singing ‘We are aliiiiiive’, is just romantic love at the first listening.
Of course not every song on the album is like this one, there are even a few I don’t really care for, but there are enough layers of sounds and melodies to keep me interested till the end.
Death Cab are the kings of the indie music scene, so they are necessarily the center of a lot of attention. Last year Gibbard said to Spin that the album was ‘a guitar-based record’, but they have ’been into vintage keyboards and playing with that palette’ and were ‘not adding guitars because people will be expecting them’. There is a large use of keyboard, but more than usual? Probably, but I could not really tell after a few times of listening to it, it sounded quite Death Cab to me.
And what about the strange pound key on the cover? The hashtag that let us find our way on twitter, could it be what he is talking about when Gibbard sings ‘But the codes and keys/They can protect you’? May be, because there is much talk about finding your own way in this album.
With the disoriented ‘Home is a Fire’ opening track, its sparse notes and vocals heavy on the Postal Service style, they slowly build an insecure atmosphere as the song is wandering in the streets of Los Angeles, flying over the freeways, looking for something else. One of the album themes seems to be about being afraid to escape from our own comfort, about how difficult it is to question ourselves and our own home: ‘Home, home is a fire/A burning reminder/Of where we belong, oh/With walls, built up around us/The bricks make me nervous/They're only so strong, though’
This fear of leaving home comes back in ‘Codes and Keys’: ‘You're on the floor/Fearful of what's outside your door’, and the door/home theme is definitively a recurrent one, with ‘Doors unlocked and open’, a song that starts with an almost krautrock-slow-built-up instrumental of one minute and half, and this promise that we’ll be free with, precisely, our doors unlocked and open.
The sort of center-piece of the album ‘You’re a Tourist’, with its Built to Spill-esque guitars-vocals fierce combination, forces these doors and lets this feeling explode ‘And if you feel just like a tourist in the city you were born/Then it's time to go/And define your destination/There's so many different places to call home’.
Many of the songs are about change, the rediscovering of your true-self and Gibbard’s personal life, beating his alcoholic addiction in 2008 and marrying indie-dream-girl Zooey Deschanel, may have something to do with all this.
And certainly there are the love songs. The slow and serious ‘Unobstructed Views’, with another one of these long introductions, is a realistic or pessimistic (depending on your own believes) love declaration: ‘There's no eye in the sky/Just our love/No unobstructed view/No perfect truths/Just our love’.
And is there more truthful love affirmation than being serene about growing old with someone? ‘But all these lines and greys refine, They are the maps of our design’, he sings on the bouncing and glittering ’Monday Morning’,… did they meet on a Monday Morning?
So if love is the only sure thing in this cold changing world, the sky is empty, as you can hear it again with solemnity in ‘St Peter’s Cathedral’ lyrics: ‘It's either quite a master plan/Or just chemicals that help us understand/That when our hearts stop ticking/This is the end/And there's nothing past this’, finishing in one long soaring strings-layered vocals moment.
Ben Gibbard even lets himself really go with ‘Stay Young Go Dancing’, a so lighthearted folk-waltz you have a hard time to think it belongs there: 'Cause when she sings I hear a symphony’, wow, such an unusual happy ending, is that really DCFC?
The album has hardly received the unanimity of the critics, some have even been saying the album was lacking any originality, and, I paraphrase, was a collection of generic songs with platitudes for lyrics. I just think they are jealous because he got cute and talented Zooey.