Album of the Week: Death Cab for Cutie Kintsugi

There are artists you're able to connect with on an intellectual level – artists whose work you can appreciate for both their technical and lyrical skill, for the way they push the boundaries of their genre and the new surprises they consistently devise.

Then there are artists who you connect to on an emotional level. These artists are certainly capable of pulling all the aforementioned achievements off, but it hardly matters if they do or not. What matters is the way they transport you to a certain headspace every time you listen to them.

Death Cab for Cutie is one of those bands for me.

Listening any of their albums (and I should, in the interest of full disclosure say, I've yet to find a Death Cab album I don't like) takes me a road trip though memories: discovering them on an exploratory trip to Seattle with a dear friend; driving to all of their concerts in Colorado since 2004 with my brother and another longtime companion; bonding with a new friend half a country away in Florida via AOL Instant Messenger over their music. As time has gone on, I don't see any of these people as much as I'd like, and it can be a melancholy affair to reflect on the distance between us.

Death Cab lives in that space between people, and has created some of its best songs – "Transatlanticism," "Brothers on a Hotel Bed," "Cath…" – out of the desire to bridge the gap that separates us from the people we care about.

Separation is clearly on lead singer/songwriter Ben Gibbard's mind on their new album, Kintsugi, and it's easy to see why. Founding member/guitarist/producer Chris Walla left the group (though he did stay around to finish recording the album), and he went through a pretty public divorce. The subjects can be heard, both overtly and subtly, in his writing (nothing new there – this stuff is Gibbard's bread and butter), and he tackles the topics with his usual wit and earnestness.

What is surprising about Kintsugi is how overflowing with hooks it is. Death Cab has proved ably capable of writing enormously catchy songs when they feel like it (I'm looking at you "The Sound of Settling" and "I Will Possess Your Heart"), but I had no idea they were capable of writing hooks on hooks on hooks like they do here.

Take album opener "No Room In Frame," which features Gibbard singing about the paradigm shifts that accompany an ending relationship over an electronic drum beat – courtesy of Jason McGerr – and a deceptively infectious guitar line. When he sings, "And I guess it's not a failure we could help/And we will both go on to get lonely with someone else," at the song's end, the words are instantly familiar to anyone still grieving a breakup.

The catchiest (and poppiest) song here is "Good Help (is So Hard to Find)." It's like the band took the lessons from "You're a Tourist" (the previous claimant to their catchiest work) and upped it another level or three. The chorus is almost guaranteed to get in your head and set up permanent camp there – prepare yourself.

Kintsugi might be the most similar album to Death Cab's earlier work, and sounds like the album the group would have made next if they had skipped the pianos and synths that largely drove Plans, Narrow Stairs and Codes and Keys, and stuck with guitar rock. It's interesting to hear the guitars so prominent on the album (It's not until seven songs in that the guitar receives any kind of challenge from another instrument. Spoiler – the guitar wins.) and Gibbard only does his piano-ballad thing on closer, "Binary Sea." Perhaps this is a way of saying goodbye to Walla and his guitar stylings, or it could just be the sonic landscape the band found the most appealing this time around – whatever the case, it sounds good on them.

This is the first Death Cab album Walla hasn't produced, and it's startling just how clear every note sounds. This is truly, truly a beautifully recorded album and I suppose some longtime fans may miss the slightly grungier tones of earlier albums, but let's face it, Death Cab albums have always been impeccably recorded. It doesn't surprise me the trend continues, even without Walla's fingerprints all over the production.

While Death Cab doesn't exactly go in for new sounds on Kintsugi, there are some lovely call-backs to earlier works sprinkled throughout. "Hold No Guns" is a simple, solo-acoustic number that can comfortably stand next to "I Will Follow You into the Dark" in its arresting, luminous simplicity. "The Ghosts of Beverly Drive" is the upbeat, rocky story of a traveler that could easily be imagined ending with him staring down over "Bixby Canyon Bridge" from Narrow Stairs.

The best song here may well be "Little Wanderer" (it's certainly is in Gibbard'sopinion) and it shows the group's continuously expanding knack for taking a tired cliché and giving it a new perspective. The song tells the story of a traveling musician from the eyes of the person left behind, with all the missed connections and hiccups that accompany communication in the modern age. The methods of communication will continue to change, but that doesn't matter, because the song is really just a plea for connection – a plea Death Cab for Cutie has made many times before. And I'll be damned if it doesn't work every time.

Kintsugi is out on Atlantic.