New Releases from Belle and Death Cab
By Kate Brokaw
A&F Associate

It’s been a gloomy couple of years for Belle and Sebastian’s legions of rabid fans. The most recent period in the band’s long career has been marked by an increasing unevenness and inconsistency of material. With band member departures, ill-advised shared songwriting duties, and a spate of releases consisting of scattered EPs and an insubstantial soundtrack (to Todd Solondz’s dreadful Storytelling), the glory days of the band’s intricately majestic Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister seemed long gone.

It is this recent disappointment, ever-building since the band’s spotty’Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, that makes the tightly-constructed, undeniably giddy new Dear Catastrophe Waitress both a reinvention for Belle and Sebastian and a huge relief for their fans. Their fifth proper full-length is a sublime pop pastiche of a record. With a striking lack of the wistful, nostalgia that shaped their older, more established work, Dear Catastrophe represents a major tonal shift for the band. The arrangements on this album are as beautifully intricate as anything the band has ever done, but they are part of a sound that is much brighter and sunnier (a change that was perhaps hinted at by their eminently danceable 2000 single “Legal Man”).

Perhaps most crucially, the songs are also part of a sound of a songwriter in love. Stuart Murdoch, forever the band’s central (and best) songwriter, has evolved from writing tales of isolated, lonely confusion to penning ballads about being completely and gloriously in love. “Elope with me Miss Private and we’ll sail around the world/I will be your Ferdinand and you my wayward girl,” he proposes in “Piazza, New York Catcher.” Later in the album, he advises: “If you find yourself caught in love/Say a prayer to the man above.”

But throughout all the wry pop experiments and cheerful choruses, this is a cohesive and focused album. “Step Into My Office, Baby” is a deliciously naughty story about an office misadventure. But a sense of sincerity returns on the intoxicatingly pretty “If She Wants Me,” where Murdoch admits that “If I could do just one near perfect thing I’d be happy.” And tracks like “I’m a Cuckoo” and “Stay Loose” seem almost sprawling in their pop complexity, but they remain grounded both by musical and lyrical specificity. Having clearly found new ambition and strength in that old-fashioned premise of being in love, Belle and Sebastian have made a long-awaited, full-force return.

On the flip side of indie-pop reinvention, last week also saw the release of what is arguably Death Cab for Cutie’s most generic album to date, Transatlanticism. Coming on the heels of the huge success of The Postal Service—an exceptional, genre-mixing project that eclipsed nearly everything else in the independent music world last year—Ben Gibbard’s return to his main band is a miscalculated and unimpressive effort. A huge disappointment for any fan of Death Cab for Cutie’s layered, understated musical subtlety, Transatlanticism is both overblown and horribly dull.

The overproduced bombast of an album opener “The New Year” strikes immediate alarm, as big guitars clash with boring lyrics and a painfully radio-pandering sound. It is this kind of unexciting sound that permeates much of the album, without much variation. “Title and Registration” and “Expo ’86” have some nicely loopy melodies and sharp guitar work by Chris Walla, but there’s just a general lack of care for musical detail that marked Death Cab for Cutie’s previous efforts, even the more hi-fi 2001 release The Photo Album.

Having constructed a beloved musical canon of bittersweet, uniquely worded tales about love and poetry and longing, the most striking weakness of Transatlanticism is Gibbard’s lyrics. The contrast between anything off of 2000’s We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes and a track like Transatlanticism’s “Lightness” (“your heart is a river that flows from your chest/through every organ/your brain is the dam/and I am the fish who can’t reach the cord”) is drastic; any ache here is more a result of painfully clichéd awkwardness.

Gibbard’s strength as a songwriter, and thus much of the success of Death Cab for Cutie, has always been in deliriously wordy romanticism. These very script-worthy images are most glaringly absent from the mediocre Transatlanticism.

On the album’s epic, seemingly endless eight-minute title track, Gibbard admits that “the distance is too far for me to row,” and, indeed, this once-great songwriter has steered his band way off track.