Death Cab for Cutie has always been tougher in concert than on record. Ben Gibbard’s songs about sad, lonely people occasionally play that way at home or on your iPod: sad and lonely. It can all get a bit insular and depressing. Onstage, the band tends to turn up the volume a notch or two and lets its sensitive indie-pop play out beneath a squall of guitars. This dynamic is particularly noticeable on Death Cab’s latest CD, Narrow Stairs, by far its strongest, most straightforward, and ambitious album. At the Plain Dealer Pavilion last night, the new songs took on shapes, sizes, and scope, while familiar to anyone who’s heard a Death Cab song from the ’00s, which practically tore at the tunes’ core from the inside out …
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2008.