“Soul Meets Body”
from the album Plans
2005
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Chris Walla was eating a burrito in rural Massachusetts when he had a eureka moment.
“Maybe we should call the record Plans,” the Death Cab for Cutie guitarist recalled telling bassist Nick Harmer. They presented the idea to the rest of the band, who lingered on it for only a few brief seconds before agreeing.
“I swear to God, it was that easy,” Walla laughed. Due August 30, Death Cab’s fifth album picks up where their 2003 breakthrough, Transatlanticism, left off.
“They’re in the same kind of ilk as [The Beatles’] Rubber Soul to Revolver,” frontman Ben Gibbard said of the companionlike nature of the albums, stressing that he’s not comparing their work to the Fab Four.
“It has a lot of the spirit of Transatlanticism,” Walla explained. “Picking up there, yet moving forward. This is the first time in the history of the band that the same four people have worked on two records in a row.”
While “The O.C.” has famously been generous to the band’s rising profile the past two years, it’s another show that has featured their music — HBO’s “Six Feet Under” — that has the most in common with the new album’s dark motifs. While emolike sentiments of love and loss remain, existential questions revolving around life and death seem to preoccupy the quartet on Plans. And despite Death Cab’s most fruitful times, a major-label debut, artistic autonomy and a huge following awaiting their next move, Gibbard can’t help but wait for the other shoe to drop.
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“When things are going great I can only think, ‘When is this going to end?’ ” Gibbard said. “[In a good relationship] it’s like, ‘One of us is gonna die one day, and that’s really gonna be a bummer.’ Knowing that there will be an eventual end to it is something I can’t shake and should probably seek therapy for.”
However bleak it sounds, the record still retains optimism and walks that patented DCFC line between where happiness ends and sadness begins. (Or is it the other way around?)
The album opens with the anthemic and bittersweet “Marching Bands of Manhattan,” a soaring and classic Death Cab mini-movie. Commencing with elegiac organs, a lyrical story builds to a Coldplay-esque grandiloquence with the heartbreaking lyrics “Sorrow drips into your heart from a pinhole/ Just like a faucet that leaks/ And there is comfort in the sound/ But while you debate half-empty and half-full/ Your love is gonna drown.”
Produced by guitarist/studio whiz Walla in a barn in Longview, Massachusetts, the album achieved a focus from the isolation. “It’s got a pretty cool sonic sprawl to it,” he said. “But it’s more concentrated and more pinpointed than the other records, and I think that comes with the clarity of being zeroed in — being in a barn, not having anything around you.”
Plans‘ first single, “Soul Meets Body,“ is an uptempo track that again grapples with existential questions and reconciling personal needs. “It’s a declaration of desire over circumstance,” Walla said. “It means, ‘Here’s where I am and here’s what I want to be and how do I bridge those two things.’ I think it’s a beautiful articulation of love, friendships and relationships and everything you do over the course of the day.”
While a video has yet to be shot, Death Cab do have some humorous ideas. “Cheerios,” Walla said, “swimming through a bowl of cereal — you know, a whole General Mills theme.”
Other key tracks on the 11-track Plans include the wistful piano number “What Sarah Said” — with its melancholy refrain “Love is watching someone die/ So who’s gonna watch you die?” — and the sparse, acoustic “I Will Follow You Into the Dark,” which reprises the death theme yet again.
“There’s a lot of songs about love and death and how those two things interact with one another, themes of finding love and being afraid of losing it to a number of things and a sense of never being quite satisfied,” a reflective Gibbard said.
Antidotes to those heavy contemplative moods (at least musically) are the upbeat “Your Heart is an Empty Room” and “Crooked Teeth.” “[Plans] can be uplifting, but not in that new-agey kind of way. It’s certainly not a Christian-rock record,” Gibbard laughed.
An October tour with Stars and Youth Group is expected to be announced soon. Those who can’t wait for Plans‘ August release can busy themselves with the group’s recent DVD, Drive Well, Sleep Carefully, a 13-song collection of live performances from a 2004 spring tour plus a handful of festival dates including a Lollapalooza appearance.