Review Summary: I return to the scenes of these crimes
The idea that pain and suffering leads to great art has long been proven to be true within music. Artists/bands often create some of their best work when facing personal strife; classics like Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and more recently The War on Drug’s Lost in the Dream have all been born from one form of grief or another. But of all the problems musicians face in their music, relationship issues are by far the most frequent. One band who has always revelled in exposing the dark emotional underbelly of relationships for inspiration is Death Cab for Cutie. The band helped pioneer the passive aggressive indie rock band stereotype as singer Ben Gibbard plumbed the depths of his failed relationships on early albums We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes and Transatlanticism and found himself equal parts remorseful, vindictive and petty. The band continued the trend until 2011’s Codes and Keys, on which Gibbard’s marriage to indie dream girl Zooey Deschanel seemed to soften his more bitter edges and found Death Cab sounding surprisingly positive. Then, just as swiftly, came the news of their impending divorce.
The good news for the fans that felt cheated by indie rock’s premier pessimist finding happiness is that the collapse of Ben’s marriage takes centre stage on new album Kintsugi. The atmosphere of the entire album is polluted with the fallout of his divorce. Subtlety has never been one of the singer’s concerns (Death Cab’s past highlights have been built around devastatingly direct truths) and Kintsugi finds Gibbard, now in his late-thirties, facing the idea of starting his life afresh and alone with his usual candour and trademark cynicism.
Unsurprisingly then, given the context, Kintsugi is an album obsessed with loss; both the loss of a partner and the loss of a stable place in life. Every track is laced with hostility towards the past, confusion about the present and doubt over the future. The majority of the album is hopelessly stuck in the past though and Gibbard seems intent on dispelling the idea that his split was an amicable one. The opening trio quickly reveal the sour nature of the divorce; No Room in Frame has him questioning if he was as important to his wife as her fame and celebrity was, on Black Sun he wonders how something so fair could be so cruel, implying an unseen dark side to his marriage and similarly on Ghosts of Beverley Drive he compares Deschanel to a wave that reduces him to rubble. It’s quintessential Death Cab but manages to sound darker than before; the cuts are deeper, the mistakes less recoverable and the failures more final.
So while the past has become a minefield of toxic memories the present and the future are more uncertain. You’ve Haunted Me All Your Life sees Gibbard seemingly addressing love itself as an unattainable woman and resigning himself to the fact that he may never find “true love”, on Everything’s a Ceiling he concludes he has “nowhere to go but further below” and during penultimate track Ingenue he commands the eponymous woman to leave town in search of something better whilst she still can. Album highlight Little Wanderer is where all three (past, present and future) collide. The track takes place pre-divorce and finds Ben struggling with being so far apart from his wife so frequently yet still believing they can make it work. Since the listener knows the story ends has no happy ending, Gibbard’s promise to be a lighthouse leading his love home is even more heartbreaking, soon he will find himself adrift without a guiding light to bring him safely home. It epitomises the lost spirit of the album, showing a broken past, an uncertain present and a bleak future now that his marriage has dissolved.
Of course Gibbard’s divorce isn’t the only loss the band has endured; co-founder, guitarist and long-time producer Chris Walla announced his departure early in the creation of Kintsugi. Walla spent years finding a sound that fitted Death Cab perfectly and whilst new producer Rich Costey does find some new treats, the propulsive guitars on Ghosts of Beverley Drive and dance-pop of Good Help are two highlights, Walla’s absence is keenly felt on the album’s missteps. Hold No Guns attempts to replicate I Will Follow You’s bare bones success by employing no more than an acoustic guitar and Ben’s emotive croon but it falls oddly flat with Gibbard sounding entirely detached from the words he’s singing. Elsewhere Black Sun plods along at mid-tempo and fails to generate any significance and El Dorado is a reminder that Death Cab are not a band that should necessarily step too far out of their comfort zone with the layered vocals being muddled to the point of obfuscation.
It’s easy to view Kintsugi as a companion piece to Codes and Keys; two sides of the same relationship coin that examines the highs of finding a person to spend your life with and the lows of realising you were wrong but as No Room in Frame suggests, it’s not a failure he or his now ex-wife could help. That realization and his subsequent resignation can be felt throughout the entire album and makes Kintsugi one of Death Cab for Cutie’s most painfully honest and heartfelt statements yet.
