Review of Codes and Keys - Death Cab for Cutie

It’s safe to say that Death Cab for Cutie has now been inducted into that rare breed of musical acts that enjoy both massive popularity and the ability to experiment without alienating said popularity. Granted, Death Cab is not popular to the tune of U2 or experimental to the tune of Radiohead (if Thom Yorke and company hasn’t abandoned the idea of “tune” entirely…), but I think the band has arrived at a comfortable middle ground.

Their seventh full-length album finds them treading a pleasant mixture of the familiar and the foreign. Hype surrounding the album focused on comments from both Chris Walla and Ben Gibbard that the album would be less “guitar-based” than previous work. Incorporating new textures and keyboard sounds, songs like “Unobstructed Views” would fit nowhere else into the band’s catalogue. Despite the shift in approach, the songwriting remains as strong as ever.

Although the lyrics occasionally fall into the trite, Gibbard and Walla redeem themselves by hanging the words over massive, overblown arrangements. I don’t mean to suggest that Death Cab is wandering into the My Bloody Valentine territory of let’s-make-our-voices-into-instruments! (Although the album was mixed by My Bloody Valentine mastermind Alan Moulder…just sayin’…); I mean only to say that the music provides a welcome showcase for the powers of Gibbard's voice...lyrics be damned.

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One beauty of this record is that the clarion quality of Gibbard’s voice (not for the first time, but maybe more emphatically than ever) really jumps out at you. Most of the record swirls with heavy sounds: layers of guitars and synths and drum effects—Walla admits to LCD Soundsystem’s This Is Happening as an inspiration—but Gibbard’s voice cuts right through them.

A friend of mine once pointed out that Gibbard’s voice is so good because he never received any professional training; in a way, the pure quality of his voice lends him a kind of credence that other professionals cannot muster. For example, those who have been trained for opera will never sing “purely” ever again. Every time they sing, they will affect their voice in the way that they have trained it. Sometimes it seems that Gibbard (this sounds silly, I know) sings with no restraint...not that he's belting the notes or anything like that, but rather that he's at total freedom with his voice and how to use it.

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Ever the hapless critic, I keep looking at the album title and expecting some hidden meaning to reveal itself to me. Is there one? Both the title and the “pound” (#) symbol on the cover seem so deliberate I can’t help but give it a try. But, of course, the title track presents me with one of Gibbard’s more inscrutable sets of lyrics:

We won’t get far

flying in circles inside a jar,

because the air we breathe

is thinning with the words that we speak…

that we speak

you and me

that we speak

you and me.

You’re on the floor,

fearful of what's outside your door.

But the codes and keys,

they can protect you

from the pangs of jealousy.

So are the words exchanged between the narrator and his companion unimportant because they “[thin]…the air [they] breathe”? It’s a fine idea, but it doesn’t seem to relate to the second verse, which approaches an entirely different problem. Are we then to take “codes and keys” to be language? If language can protect this person from “the pangs of jealousy,” then what else is it capable of doing?

To be honest, I’m not digging the “language approach.” It’s probably better to think about “codes and keys” in relation to music itself. (How apropos!) I think it wouldn’t be unfair to claim that some people (Gibbard himself) use music as a kind of buffer between the self and the rest of the world. The rest of “Codes and Keys” lyrics:

When you scream,

love you see,

like a child

throwing stones at the sky.

When they fall back to earth

as minor chords of major works,

separate rooms of single life.

We are one,

we are alive.

When the narrator is confronted by love, his reaction is that of the child throwing stones towards the sky: the scattered stones land in different places, as “minor chords of major works” and “separate rooms of single life.” The original emotion of love has been dissected and split up through the process of songwriting. Gibbard wants to point out that it doesn’t need to be this way; he asserts that “we are one” and “we are alive” through the end of the song.

[If anyone has ideas of their own, please feel free to comment below! The analysis is never over!]

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But commenting on the quality of Gibbard’s singing or the theme/message of the work runs away from the point of this post: Codes and Keys is an excellent album. But it’s excellent not in the particularly cerebral manner of Narrow Stairs (Is that a Brian Wilson influence? Math metaphors!?) or the heartbreaking clarity of Plans and Transatlanticism, but excellent in a rather joyful tone I haven’t heard before from Death Cab.

Lead single “You Are a Tourist” has a title that sounds bleak, but offers this:

“When there's a burning in your heart, / an endless yearning in your heart, / build it bigger than the sun, / let it grow, let it grow. / When there's a burning in your heart, / don't be alarmed.”

And the final track “Stay Young, Go Dancing”? How happy is that? Ah! Let’s listen to it again!