Death Cab for Cutie
The Photo Album
Barsuk

If album art is any indication of the sound it represents, The Photo Album, the third full-length endeavor from Seattle's brainy pop outfit Death Cab for Cutie, is subtly complex. Flipping through the liner notes, you find scratched, woven and speckled textures that might be found beneath a magnifying glass. With as much explosive resonance as four guys with guitars, drums, a piano and a pull-at-your-heartstrings voice can muster (which is plenty), Death Cab for Cutie creates a sound similar to scenesters, Built to Spill, but with a tendency towards an insightfully mellow flair.

The Photo Album opens in the womb with "Steadier Footing." Benjamin Gibbard's fragile vocals are accompanied by a slow thump resembling a heartbeat and a guitar that sounds strummed and plucked from a watery cave. This leads into the enchanting "A Movie Script Ending," in which Gibbard croons, "Now we all know the words were true in the sappiest songs (yes, yes)." And, well, Death Cab for Cutie may write the sappiest songs, but, as with all the other introspective vignettes of love and the dynamics of human relations that seem to dominate its previous albums, there are no clichés to cloud its insight.

I was a kaleidoscope: the snow on my lenses distorting the image of what was only one of you and I didn't know which one to address as all your lips moved ... And it's the look that you're giving me that tells me exactly what you are thinking: "This ain't working anymore,"

from the energetic "I Was a Kaleidoscope," lends new perspective to the relationship gone wrong. Breaking up never sounded so good.

Other tracks are no exception. "Styrofoam Plates," a bitter ballad to a deadbeat dad, lends sonic quality to dysfunction with an intense crescendo to the realization that the father in question "was a bastard in life, thus a bastard in death," while the closing, "Debate Exposes Doubt," gives cynical contemplation a swaying melody that will, at the very least, have you tapping your fingers.

Altogether, the efforts of Death Cab for Cutie in The Photo Album hold together as a satisfying pastiche of literal and aural craftsmanship. And though it may not score as high on the catchy pop meter as its two predecessors, the guitar and simple piano tunes that support the thoughtful lyrics are equally intricate, and the results of the combination are simply enjoyable, even though the vocals are, at times, unfortunately lost in the noise.

In "Information Travels Faster," Gibbard sings, "I intentionally wrote it out to be an illegible mess."

It's a mess worth getting into.

— Lavina Lee (lavina at flakmag dot com)