I Built You a Tower

The Roast

“Twenty-two years on Atlantic and what did Death Cab get for it, a string of increasingly upholstered albums that sounded like sadness with a mortgage. So of course the move to ANTI- gets sold as liberation, the band finally free to be small again, and the most cynical part of me wants to roll my eyes at a return to form announced this loudly. Here is the problem with that eye roll, the record mostly earns it. John Congleton strips the band down to wire and nerve, the math rock twitches recall The Photo Album era when Gibbard still sounded hungry instead of comfortable, and the songs are about collapse, actual collapse, the world ending in slow motion while you do the dishes. Gibbard has always been pop music's most meticulous mourner, a man who could write a eulogy for a parking ticket, and on I Built You a Tower he finally has subject matter that deserves the precision. Is it Transatlanticism, no, and stop asking, that lightning lives in 2003 with your old haircut. But it is the first Death Cab album in two decades that sounds like a band with something at stake rather than a legacy act politely maintaining the brand. I came to bury them. Annoyingly, they showed up alive.”

The Bright Side

The leanness is real. Congleton's production leaves fingerprints and fret noise in the mix, and the band sounds like five people in a room instead of a subscription service. Gibbard's writing about grief and carrying on is specific and unsentimental, the melodies stick without begging, and the emo and math rock flashes feel remembered rather than reenacted. When a band twenty-nine years deep makes its sharpest record in two decades, you say it plainly: this one was worth building.

Hardest Sneer

“It took Death Cab twenty-two years on a major label to remember they were good when nobody was paying them. Sadness, it turns out, performs better without a marketing department.”

Issues (3)