Album Review: Death Cab For Cutie - 'I Built You A Tower'
“I’m too tired to talk, I’m too tired to end the war / And I can’t seem to hold it together anymore” admits Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard on ‘Riptides’, the lead single from the Seattle band’s 11th album I Built You A Tower. “I can’t bring you up to speed” he continues. “There’s too many riptides in this ocean to proceed”.
Overstimulated, politically fatigued and exasperated, it’s a record firmly situated in the fallout of catastrophe, dissecting the means and mechanisms we use to carry on when our world collapses. Whilst the tower seeks in vain to contain the past, across the album each layer is peeled away, bit by bit revealing something new.
I Built You A Tower came into existence following the dual anniversary tours that marked twenty years since 2003’s Transatlanticism and 2005’s Plans, with the band entering the studio hypersensitive to the importance of these records to fans across the world, but with all nostalgia exorcised. For Gibbard, fronting Death Cab and The Postal Service in the same show was accompanied by the unravelling of his second marriage, and coping with this grief – building a tower in which it is housed – set the course for the band’s 11th studio release.
For longtime Death Cab fans like myself, the album feels assuringly familiar, but with greater maturity surrounding Gibbard’s anxious songwriting. The reflective ‘Stone Over Water’ combines a lofi beat with self-therapeutic lyrics that only Gibbard could write, confessing “Everyday I awake like a stone over water / Skipping across a lake before I sink to the bottom”. He’s 20 years older than the man who penned the inimitable ‘I Will Follow You Into The Dark’, and ‘The Flavour of Metal’ sees the Death Cab frontman speaking not with frustration but with solace. “And I tried to hide from the rain falling inside me again / and all these storms they never seem to end”, he concedes. Over Nick Harmer’s melodic bassline wistful personal proverbs litter the rest of the track. “The only truth I’ve ever found / is that everything that ascends will soon come crashing down” Gibbard mutters in the second verse, and the following bridge sees the self-professed lapsed catholic reckon with religion, claiming “It takes just a little faith / but nothing happens every time I pray”.
Following twenty years within the major record label ecosystem, the band signed with Anti- at the start of this year, signalling a reconnection with their indie roots that coincided with an album writing process more akin to their 90s and 2000s beginnings than their previous record, the pandemic-born Asphalt Meadows. This shift towards a more ‘in the room’ approach is audible: the twinkling sparsity of ‘Pep Talk’ and hypnotic, math rock-y guitar riff of ‘I Built You A Tower (a) evoke the band’s emo beginnings from 1997’s You Can Play These Songs With Chords to 2000’s The Photo Album.
At the same time, there’s a degree of harshness that’s weaponised across the album in a way that Death Cab haven’t ever before, sharpening the record’s most urgent moments. ‘Punching The Flowers’ hits like an aggressive suckerpunch after the soft beginnings of opening track ‘Full Of Stars’, and granular static sets the stage for the frenetic guitar riff of ‘How Heavenly A State’. This raw, visceral immediacy encapsulates Gibbard’s personal turmoil whilst showcasing the slick interplay that’s developed between Death Cab’s current 5-part lineup over most of the last decade. Drummer Jason McGerr is at his colossal best in these intense numbers, delivering hammerblow after hammerblow as ‘How Heavenly A State’ bounds on.
These barbed tendencies intertwine with the album’s indie and emo sensibilities on the excellent ‘Envy The Birds’. The track opens with an unrelenting advance of scratching guitars and drums in expectant 5/4 time, before sliding into 6/4 for a muted yet ethereal B section where Gibbard repeats tenderly “Speak without words, no-one gets hurt / Safer when it’s quiet”. Drawing on natural imagery in typical Death Cab fashion, Gibbard paints a vivid picture of this isolationist desire for quiet and peace in the eye of his emotional storm.
Releasing 11 albums as a band is a feat most groups can only dream of, and I Built You A Tower certainly stands on its own two feet as an immediate testament to how we grieve, and how we carry on. Gibbard’s ultramarathon-running exploits have been long documented, but it’s across this 11th Death Cab record that he lays bare his most taxing feat of endurance, reaching a conclusion of sorts by final track ‘I Built You A Tower (b)’, a dark, grainy inversion of his softer admissions on sister title track ‘I Built You A Tower (a)’. As shredded guitar textures encapsulate the heavy weight Gibbard’s carried across the record, he’s left shattered, exhausted, but moving forwards. In pockets of quiet between the chaos he confesses “I’m learning how to live without you / These ruminations are all about you“.
Tellingly, the album’s final words are the simple “It makes me tired, so tired”. These open wounds can start to heal, the raw violence of gut-wrenching heartbreak will begin to fade, but the tower’s hulking facade takes its toll.
In Gibbard’s words, “I see the tower existing on your emotional horizon. You don’t always have to look at what’s inside it, but it’s a reminder that it happened. You know it’s there. You have to face it”.
Words by Taran Will
