Death Cab Throwing A 'Curve Ball' On New Album (from Billboard http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/art ... 1003691694 )

To follow its 2005 mainstream breakthrough, "Plans," Death Cab For Cutie opted to record live to analog tape with as few overdubs as possible. The outcome: "a sampling of the most uptempo, upbeat Death Cab songs as well as some of our saddest," bassist Nick Harmer tells Billboard.

On the as-yet-untitled album, due in late May via Atlantic, likely opener "Bixby Canyon Bridge" falls into the former category, while "The Ice Is Getting Thinner" "just breaks my heart every time," Harmer says. "It's a really pretty, electric guitar song ... it's somber like [the last album's] 'Brothers on a Hotel Bed.'"

Most unusual: the nine-minute jam "I Will Possess Your Heart," of which Harmer says, "We hit our stride on that song. We looked at the habitual things we've done in the past and tried to move beyond them."

The album also features the Long Winters' John Roderick and Pedro The Lion's David Bazan "singing on a couple of choruses, like a men's choir," as well as the song "Casino Blues," which frontman Ben Gibbard has previously debuted during his solo acoustic performances.

For his part, guitarist Chris Walla describes the album as "really weird. It's really, really good, I think, but it's totally a curve ball, and I think it's gonna be a really polarizing record. But I'm really excited about it. It's really got some teeth. The landscape of the thing is way, way more lunar than the urban meadow sort of thing that has been happening for the last couple of records."

Walla adds that it's "louder and more dissonant and ... I think abrasive would be a good word to use." A variety of influences factored into the album, he says, including Harmer's taste for "heavy, sludgy, slow metal" and Walla's rekindled interest in the synth-punk band Braniac.

Of course, a sea change after the success of "Plans" is risky, but Walla says Death Cab is collectively up for challenging its fans. "On ('Plans') we were really making a lot of decisions based on what we felt other people were gonna think," he explains. "But this record, there's this kind of slightly malicious glee that we all have that it sounds kind of crazy. It's pretty fun."

Meanwhile, Walla is crafting plans to promote his new Barsuk solo album, "Field Manual" (see thread here), even as the Death Cab campaign begins. He hopes to play some shows of his own but says that he'd "be surprised if I was able to do anything significant until June or July, if not later."

And it's unlikely he'd choose to open for Death Cab, even though Gibbard "floated" the idea. "I don't think it would be a very good idea, ultimately," he says, "if for no other reason than that's a long time for any one person to be on stage.

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1. Bixby Canyon Bridge
2. I Will Possess Your Heart
3. No Sunlight
4. Cath...
5. Talking Bird
6. You Can Do Better Than Me
7. Grapevine Fires
8. Your New Twin Sized Bed
9. Long Division
10. Pity And Fear
11. The Ice Is Getting Thinner

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0017I1RH4/?tag=imwan-20

http://www.deathcabforcutie.com/news/14 ... bum_title/

01.29.08
New Album Title
We are happy to announce that the new Death Cab album slated for release this May has a name:
NARROW STAIRS
Please stay tuned for more info about the new album coming soon.

"I Will Possess Your Heart". Vocals come in after 4 minutes.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMgQIPu0Cus#[/youtube]

Bump ~ added cover art to the first post.

Egads, when I saw that I thought I had posted a pic that went completely wonky. Gah! That is one of the ugliest album covers I ever did see.

Now they've revamped the cover art slightly (see first post), but ... still not much to write home about. I've also added the pre-order link to the first post.

They're just tempting people to download the album and not buy a physical copy with that cover, aren't they?

Rollingstone.com review... http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/alb ... row_stairs

"Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard is the poet of a particular purgatory — the holding cell in your head that's filled with failed relationships and wrong roads taken. Death Cab's most memorable songs contain snapshots from its walls: Gibbard has sung about an incriminating kiss in a photo booth, discovering forgotten pictures of an ex in his glove compartment, and an especially bleak Kodak moment from a doomed marriage. On "Cath . . . ," from the band's new Narrow Stairs, he finds a girl "in a hand-me-down wedding dress," and the details feel like knife twists: "As the flashbulbs burst, she holds a smile/Like someone would hold a crying child."
That sort of heartbreak defines Narrow Stairs. But where Death Cab's past records made it easy to empathize with Gibbard's narrators, the group's second major-label release zeros in on characters who are often more creepy than cuddly. The result is a dark, strangely compelling record that trades the group's bright melancholy for something nearer to despair.

Death Cab's previous album, 2005's Plans, played to the impeccable craftsmanship of producer-guitarist Chris Walla, who has also made records with indie colleagues the Decemberists and Tegan and Sara. Plans was the sound of a band standing in open space, every note articulated. Its characters dreamed of flight, reveled in sunlight and saw endless possibilities. In one song, Gibbard imagined opening his arms to span the length of Manhattan, and musically, that's exactly what the band did.

Narrow Stairs does the opposite. Elaborate multitrack recording has been replaced with the sound of a band in a room: drum hits elbowing through overmodulating bass lines, feedback squalls obscuring piano and vocals, clotting the air like smoke. The sense of claustrophobia even extends to the breaks between tracks, which are nonexistent or fleeting; songs are cut off by noise bursts or begin with the lurch of a tape-machine capstan. This fits the material — the album is as dark as anything the band has done. The most glaring example is the single "I Will Possess Your Heart," which begins with nearly five wordless minutes of midtempo groove-building before becoming a love letter from a stalker. "You gotta spend some time with me," he sings with a trace of menace, noting his reflection in his beloved's window as he cruises by, "and I know that you'll find, love/I will possess your heart." Restraining order, please!

It's playing against type for a guy with one of rock's purest voices — a vibrato-less, bell-clear high tenor whose choirboy quality only throws the darkness here into relief. "No Sunlight" documents the death of an optimist over a perky New Wave backbeat. The feedback-spiked "Talking Bird" portrays a passive-aggressive lover whose devotion seems tinged with loathing. And "You Can Do Better Than Me" — where a man decides to stay in a troubled relationship "out of fear of dying alone" — comes across as a jaunty, Pet Sounds-style organ-rock stroll. Who knew timpani and sleigh bells could sound so unnerving?

But the most indelible moment is "Grapevine Fires," a minor-key processional framed by churchy organ and electric piano. In it, a man brings his lover and her daughter to a cemetery, where the couple watch the girl dance against a backdrop of brush fires like those that ravaged Southern California last year. "I knew . . . everything would be all right," Gibbard sings, with an angelic chorus flaring up around the last word. But any certainty is wishful thinking. By the song's end, firemen "worked in double shifts." Whether they succeed or fail remains a mystery.

There are some heavy-handed moments. "Your New Twin Sized Bed" ("With a single pillow underneath your single head") and "The Ice Is Getting Thinner" are love eulogies whose metaphors feel a little too easy. But Gibbard's indie-rock blues still plumb emotional depths with remarkable literary detail. The songwriter has spoken about the influence that Jack Kerouac's end-of-the-road narrative Big Sur had on Narrow Stairs, especially on the opening track, "Bixby Canyon Bridge," a tribute to a Big Sur landmark. That song's narrator makes a pilgrimage to the sacred spot but finds himself "no closer to any sort of truth" than when he began. Still, by the end of this haunting record, Gibbard has gained a deep understanding of lovelessness and the way people live in its quiet wreckage."

Death Cab for Cutie Do Rhapsody EP, DNC Show
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/n ... p-dnc-show

There's just no such things as too many digital EPs for Death Cab for Cutie. The Pacific Northwesterners have supplemented their recent Narrow Stairs and even more recent iTunes Live EP [unfortunately UK only - calijawn] with a Rhapsody exclusive EP featuring a set they played for Bay Area radio station KFOG. The EP is called KFOG Private Concert, and it's available now.

Death Cab can't seem to get enough of the road, either. In addition to the band's U.S. tour and recently announced shows opening for Neil Young, frontman Ben Gibbard and guitarist/producer Chris Walla will get their Rage on by playing a show in Denver during the shortly forthcoming Democratic National Convention. The duo's acoustic set will be on August 26 at a private educational event called "Concert for a Cooler Planet" presented by the League of Conservation Voters.

KFOG Private Concert:

01. Brothers on a Hotel Bed
02. Grapevine Fires
03. Talking Bird
04. Photobooth
05. I Will Possess Your Heart