ALBUM: "Plans" - Death Cab for Cutie (Atlantic, 2005)

There are three types of people I fundamentally distrust in this world: those who listen to 5ive and N’Sync in their bedrooms without any hint of irony; grown men who wear wigs; and people who describe Death Cab for Cutie as ‘emo’.


This perception of the band has always flummoxed me. ‘Emo’ (as perhaps best characterised by early Taking Back Sunday) is discordant and abrasive; by contrast, Death Cab are the exact opposite: absolute ear-candy. For me, the Seattle quartet are the most literate, artful and intelligent pop band at work today, making music as rich and cerebral as it is emotionally affecting. Their major-label debut Plans – released to a slightly cynical response from the indie bloggerati after The O.C. turned their heroes into a convenient stereotype for cartoon teenagers – is their masterpiece.


Perhaps the best-produced album in terms of sheer listenability since Jimmy Eat World’s ground-breaking Clarity, the band’s lush orchestrations bring a widescreen cinematic texture to frontman Benjamin Gibbard’s incredible songs. There is so much attention to detail paid to the instrumentation of each sound that the cumulative effect is a swirling cacophony of technicolour - best evidenced on the album’s ravishing opener Marching Bands of Manhattan, which cloaks its mathematical refrain in layers of interlocking melodies to create a structural architecture that few bands can match.


However, what really raises Death Cab above their contemporaries is Gibbard’s mastery of lyrical metaphor: his songs are always about one thing on the surface and something else entirely underneath. Nowhere is this more apparent here than on the stunning I Will Follow You into the Dark, as touching a proclamation of eternal devotion as you are ever likely to hear. On Summer Skin he relays a tale of lost love with such evocative precision that it yields a ghostly portrait of memory, loss and regret. Someday You Will Be Loved reflects on past cruelties from the vantage-point of a mature adult perspective, traversing barriers of time and physicality as he rights the wrongs of his frivolous youth. Later, he describes a fading relationship in terms of two faces turned away from one another, “Like brothers on a hotel bed”. (Indeed, equally worth investigating is the Directions DVD, a series of visual accompaniments which lends the album whole new layers of resonance).


There honestly isn’t a duff track on here, from Crooked Teeth’s lovably sozzled ramblings to the lurching barroom-cum-electronica of Different Names for the Same Thing. However, my favourite moment comes towards the end of the album in the waltzing coda of What Sarah Said. Easily the most sorrowful of the litter, the song muses on notions of empathy and betrayal while its author waits in a sterile hospital wing for news of a waning loved one. “Love is watching someone die”, Gibbard broods, before stepping back from the microphone to render his next pronouncement only partly audible: “So who’s going to watch you die?” It’s an incredible moment, one that encapsulates everything that is great about this band in one fell swoop: understated, profound and almost unbearably moving. Like the album itself (which takes a good 10-15 listens before you can even begin to edge beneath its surface), time will hopefully reveal Death Cab for Cutie to be among the most valued American treasures.