Pitchfork

On Plans, the band's fifth album, Death Cab made the jump from the friendly confines of Barsuk Records to the storied halls of Atlantic, a move that makes a lot of sense. The band is ready for the large, diverse audience a major can provide, and they make the transition seamlessly, in large part due to the underrated production of guitarist Chris Walla, who has a way of making even the weirder flourishes (and the band tries a few to mixed success here) feel totally natural.

Despite Walla's consistently cozy production, Ben Gibbard's lyrics continue to move from critiques of middle-class life to tackling Big Themes, here the relationship between death and love. On "What Sarah Said" he claims, "Love is watching someone die." On "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" it's the title sentiment, and on "Soul Meets Body" he says, "If the silence takes you, then I hope it takes me too."

"I Will Follow You..." is the album's quiet centerpiece, just Gibbard on acoustic guitar, his fragile, almost falsetto tenor, simple delivery, and unexpected turns of phrase turning an well-worn lyrical road, the fear of losing a lover, into something affecting. The way he personalizes the afterlife and draws in childhood Catholic school experiences is impressive, to say the least. All this and it's sequenced directly after the album's most musically ambitious track, "Different Names for the Same Thing", an overly melodramatic track that heads off on a ponderous, M83-aping electronic odyssey.

The band's other, better experiment is lead single "Soul Meets Body", a sleek pop track that excels except for when the drums drop dead, the textures get all smooshy, and Gibbard goes up the scale to sing the title-- it's such a weird blunder that it's hard to tell at first if it derails the song or just nudges it a bit. Several listens in, the song works on the strength of its catchy "ba da ba da ba ba" passages and the incredible verse melody, but that one little passage is awkward, like the song has something stuck in its teeth. Death Cab opens the album strongly with "Marching Bands of Manhattan", a song that feels like it's constantly in the process of taking off, with pensive drumming and big, sweeping vocals singing about sorrow seeping into your heart as if through a pin-hole.

For its peaks, the album also has its share of valleys, like "Summer Skin", notable mostly for its nifty bassline, and "Your Heart Is an Empty Room", a song that never breaks out of its musical holding pattern. The band suffers from the infliction: Death Cab still sounds basically the same as ever in the post-"O.C." world. In a way, it's comforting to know what you're getting: Four or five songs you'll treasure, four or five you'll tolerate, and a pretty good band sticking to their guns. In another sense, it would be nice if a band reaching for a larger audience had a sound that matched that sense of ambition.