T
itle Track"
from Death Cab for Cutie 's second album,
We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes , employs one of the coolest production tricks I've ever heard. The song begins with iffy sound quality, sounding like bad streaming audio, and then, when the drums kick in on the second verse, like they normally would in a similarly structured song, the sound quality simultaneously turns crystal clear as well, and the extra emphatic punch is incredible.
There's no such explicit production tricks on the latest Death Cab album,
Transatlanticism, but the intelligence behind it is still strongly evident. The album is an almost perfect mix of mood, melody, and literate descriptiveness.
The opening track, "The New Year" (
So this is the new year /
and I don't feel any different ), tells you essentially everything you need to know about the album. The delicacy of the Death Cab songwriting is still here, but underneath the key layers of Ben Gibbard's vocals, the plucked guitars, and the occasional xylophone, is a harder core. The delicate tracks are more than likely to burst into a heavy guitar bridge before returning to their original form, or expertly supply breaks between the pop catchiness of the other songs ("The Sound of Settling," "We Looked Like Giants," "Expo '86").
"The New Year" is among the highlights — it even sounds December-y, in the way that
U2's "New Year's Day" evokes the same — a bit bleak, a bit brisk. "Title and Registration" is a perfect example of the literary bent of Gibbard's lyrics, where a meditation on linguistic origins (
The glove compartment / isn't accurately named / and everybody knows it ) turns into a reminiscence of a past relationship, based on old pictures the narrator finds in his car. It's almost like a sonnet John Donne or another poet from that era might write today, comparing love to some seemingly non-sequiter object.
However, the centerpiece of the album — in terms of track placement, in length, in emotional impact — is the title track. "Transatlanticism" starts out as a kind of mythical origin dream of the Atlantic (
I was standing on the surface of a perforated sphere / when the water filled every hole ), which morphs into a symbol of two people separated by an ocean of distance. The song then simply builds and builds for the rest of its lovely eight minutes, on the repetition of the mantra "I need you so much closer," such that an overpowering feeling of need and desire soaks through the speakers.
And then the album keeps going, just as strong in various ways, for four more songs.
Transatlanticism is definitely up there with best albums I've heard this year.
