Death Cab For Cutie - I Built You A Tower

At last, a true late-career highlight from indie rock titans Death Cab For Cutie.

Sometimes I still feel a dull ache for the time of the iPod. Sure, music was available to you most anywhere, so long as the battery was charged. But there was no instant gratification of simply searching up a song and having it be there. You had to put a little work in. Nights were spent at the computer, eyes red from staring at the screen, as you tried to sequence your big stupid teenage feelings. You were locking in the score of your life: riding the bus every morning, the first date, the first breakup, taking swigs of blue raspberry Svedka after prom. All these memories came rushing back when the Strokes announced an album. Then came a lethal triple-release day including Of Montreal and Modest Mouse. Having heard all of this, Interpol locked the fuck in and announced their own record. “It’s just like my iPod!” I gushed incredulously to friends I’ve had since those days, over some small-town Mexican restaurant abomination called a sangrita. "All we need is Motion City Soundtrack and Arcade Fire!"

Death Cab For Cutie (and all the different spellings that wound up in our iTunes libraries) participated in that June 5th release date. They were a staple band for overly-sensitive girls on the wrong side of Gen Z. We were hopelessly swept up in the forces of Millennial optimism, which evaporated just as we turned those tassels on our grad caps around. For graying dudes in tennis shoes, women who put on NPR as they drive back and forth from (insert name that ends in “-eigh”)’s play group, all who know the pain of growing those damn razor-cut Myspace bangs out, and this precious subset of elder Zoomer girls, Death Cab’s music is held close to the heart.This band soundtracked everything, especially the heartbreaks. And they make us feel old all the time: “Such Great Heights” (yes it’s the Postal Service, but it’s all the same honestly) is now in an Xfinity commercial. We’ve all got to grow up and have our own phone lines sometime.

I was fifteen when Kintsugi came out; drying my toenail polish in my Pepto-Bismol pink room as I listened to an album about divorce. Funny enough, it wasn’t until I became a repeat long-distance relationship offender (and experienced the consequences of such) in adulthood that Death Cab’s classic and pre-classic outputs fully revealed their wonders to me. That and a hefty dose of grieving my own Millennial(ish) optimism. I’d paid bills the day before I picked up my copy of I Built You A Tower. My brain filtered the cashier’s voice so my total sounded like Charlie Brown trombones. I envy all who had rent in the triple digits.

Death Cab are looking back, too, and picking up record hauls while they’re at it. Ben Gibbard’s picks include Bedhead, Fugazi, and The Sonics, as shown on a recent episode of Amoeba Records’s “What’s In My Bag?” series. Nick Harmer picked up titles by Smog and A Tribe Called Quest. They talked up reaching way back, past The Photo Album and deep into their Barsuk Records output. Across many write-ups and interviews, I Built You A Tower was heavily marketed as a return to formula; revisiting sounds in and around Death Cab’s classic “breakup albums.” And yet, Ben said to NPR that he didn’t want to write another breakup album! “...they tend to be kind of the purview of kind of younger people who are writing from a similar position I was (in) when I was writing songs on Transatlanticism,” he said on the June 5th episode of All Things Considered. “You know, I think that what makes great breakup records is an acerbic kind of quality and an anger that I just didn’t feel and I just didn’t feel appropriate writing from.”

I Built You A Tower sounds even, with the heftier low end this listener needs and the balance to handle such. A little surface noise on the quiet parts of side B, but it’s not obstructive to the listen. The one thing this album lacks is a strong harmony vocal. Though Ben singing solo is in keeping with the album’s themes, his voice has always favored a partner. Sweeter numbers like “Full of Stars” and “Trap Door” would have benefited. Having aired this comparatively small grievance, here is every which way Death Cab have finally achieved a late-career highlight.

I Built You A Tower revolves around striving for measured response, and all the realities that make it impossible. “Full of Stars” is a careful, intentional opening statement: “Please forgive me/These nights, my head is full of stars/Of constellations retreating away from where we are/And I fear I’ll soon be wishing on an empty sky.” Joy, softly departed. Where Death Cab classics sharpened their arrows at the in-between, this narrator – this Ben, really; Tower’s primary source is a real-life separation – tries to sidestep the uncomfortable parts. “I Built You A Tower (a)” shows old habits having crept in. Jealousy, paranoia, and obsessive thinking die hard. Instead of taking the easy path, the “poor me” whining of a twenty-something emo narrator, he gingerly unpacks unflattering impulses from a place outside himself. A lot of Tower has to do with this separation from the self, both good and bad. What once pined and yearned for closeness now aches to retreat. Where he can’t fly away with the birds, he mentally checks out. A would-be argument becomes an unarmed, one-man standoff on “Riptide,” lurking in the shadows of an inevitable breakdown. “I’m too tired to talk, I’m too tired to end the war/And I can’t seem to hold it together anymore.” He can’t outrun the outcome or be calm about it. “How heavenly a state/The acceptance of collapsing.”No compartmentalizing can save or contain this. You’ve got to grow up and face the music sometime.

“I’ve got this anguish I know will never be satisfied/It’s always hungry, so I feed it/And have the nerve to wonder why/It keeps growing and throwing tantrums like a child.” Careful and measured have both tried, and they love each other very much, but they can only go so far together. Situated in a cavalcade of heartbreaks stowed inside glove compartments and the like, I Built You A Tower goes where no previous Death Cab album has gone: it acutely voices resentment. Feelings are bottled up on “Punching the Flowers” and metastasize across 38 minutes. Exits are obstructed, walls are built. Words get twisted through no fault of anyone’s and signals are crossed along the way until things boil over. There is no catharsis in such. Take “Stone Over Water:” “How I wish I could claim that I don’t harbor ill feelings/As my anger’s turning to shame/I stare a hole through the ceiling.” Our narrator does feel at least a hint of the acerbic anger that makes great breakup albums. Ben is writing from this point of view, even if it doesn’t “feel appropriate.” While faults are identified on all sides, there is no blame game. “I Built You A Tower (b)” is a breathtaking and dynamic finale with a clever perversion of the former title track's melody. What an emotional journey to go on outside the realm of the iPod, stuck in a room with a turntable as I voyeuristically peer through someone else’s jagged edges and lack of closure. It’s not the perfect way to let it all out, there is no way to curate your feelings. But what is the purpose of a breakup album if not to willingly bump our bruises, old and new, into another love’s points of fracture? Breakup albums can roll in the troughs of their writers’ acerbic anger, snarkily reminding their subjects that “It may be a little biased/But at least I spelled your name right.” I Built You A Tower is remarkable in that it paints such a clear picture of such a labyrinth, and yet it chooses not to paint the faces.

Thank You For Today just couldn’t hold my attention back in 2018. “Foxglove Through The Clearcut” off Asphalt Meadows piqued my interest a few years later, but again, the LP missed me. It was all a bit soft; appropriate background music for restaurants that serve over-salted hand-cut fries in newspaper-lined metal cups. (“We do things a little different around here,” all their menus assert.) It’s worth noting that I Built You A Tower is Death Cab's first album on an indie label since Transatlanticism. Tower is anything but background music, thanks in part to producer John Congleton. Having more room to stretch their legs creatively and a producer to encourage such have clearly benefited Death Cab. Ben’s knack for a melody and knife-sharp pen (can you believe a couplet like “You are a question without an answer, an introspection best deflected/There was no closure in your exit, it was a perfume for the scentless?”) can only take this band so far.

Of course there are sonic nods to the past: the piano line of “Trap Door” bears striking resemblance to “I Will Possess Your Heart” off Narrow Stairs. Nick Harmer’s bass lines move the room akin to that LP. Fleeting moments of nostalgia are not cheap; they seem to be the only clear-cut comfort our narrator has in this situation. “Pep Talk” and “Trap Door” prove that both band and producer have figured out how to do a reserved, electronically-driven number without it being boring. The latter’s production helps float such classic, Death Cab melodrama as, “I pledge myself to your misery/I kneel at its throne.” Devotion, even at the bitter, confusing end. Swathes of heavily-affected electronics, feedback, and overdriven guitars are used on “How Heavenly A State” without coming off as try-hard. It feels like a decade since someone’s treated drums properly on a Death Cab record, and that’s because it has been! Not constantly cringing at a needlessly flattened snare is such a relief. Having melodic, interlocking guitars back in the foreground was a delight as well. “Punching Flowers,” “Pep Talk,” and so many other cuts just wouldn’t have gotten their due deliverance without them. Clean breakups are a fool’s errand; people and their perspectives knot together until you don’t know whose are whose. But we’ve all got to grow up and swallow our hearts sometime.

My iPod Nano is now old enough to enlist in the army. It’s teal like my toenail polish, and has I Built You A Tower on it so it can score my life the same way classic Death Cab once did. I’m 27 now, sitting cross-legged in my shell pink bedroom as I listen to this album about divorce. "Every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time," as someone once said. I forget who. Time is a flat circle, but you never walk the same path. History doesn’t repeat itself – but it sure does rhyme.