For a band named after a Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band song Death Cab For Cutie have been around for a surprising fourteen years. Codes And Keys is their seventh full length studio album, and their third since signing to Atlantic in 2004.
I never liked Death Cab when it was cool. I wasn't plugged in enough to the underground/independent music scene to be aware of them. Hence when they broke I reacted to not knowing about them for their first few albums by assuming they were no good (surely if they were good I would know about them, right?).
It took me a little while to properly rectify this, and as a result I'm not the fan I could be. I like what they do, but I'm far from fanatical about it. Which is probably a good place to be when reviewing an album. Too often I try to review an album by a band that I love and I find myself apologising for the things that didn't quite work for me.
Codes And Keys is a dense album. Not in that lyrical way that it's full of references and symbols. It's musically dense. The songs seem to slowly build and to wrap themselves in layers, like peeling an onion in reverse. The result is occasionally dark, but always interesting. Every song takes a musical journey.
The result of this musical density is that you manage to hear a slightly different album every time. Each listen something else will jump out at you, a guitar line here, a piano riff there. It's an album that rewards repetition, but never feels repetitive.
Of course maybe I just want to like it to make up for all that lost time when they were good and I wasn't paying attention.
No comments:
Post a Comment