Kintsugi
Death Cab for Cutie
The opening strains of the first track No Room In Frame are a distorted snatch of a vaguely Oriental-sounding riff. It is merely a feint, though, as the guitars kick in and we are back on familiar ground.
This is the American indie rock band’s eighth studio album and they can still make melancholia sound seductive, even when cloaked in more upbeat guises.
On the uptempo The Ghosts Of Beverly Drive, lead singer Ben Gibbard muses: “I don’t know why I don’t know why/I return to the scenes of these crimes.”
At live gigs, his dry sense of humour comes through and there are glimmers of it here on Good Help (Is So Hard To Find). The track seems to be about hubris and as skyscrapers go up, he deadpans: “But beware that the air’s so thin/It starves the brain of oxygen.”
The title Kintsugi is a Japanese term which refers to a type of art involving the fixing of broken pottery. But there is a whiff of another philosophy here: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The problem is familiar ground can seem overly familiar – at times, I have flashbacks to earlier Death Cab works.
The closing ballad Binary Sea evokes comparison to the majestic Transatlanticism, with its similar theme and imagery. But as Gibbard sings on No Room In Frame: “You cannot outrun a ghost.”
(ST)