Death Cab For Cutie - Narrow Stairs

Rating: * * *

If Death Cab For Cutie's 2005 album

Plans

was their breakthrough, when the American indie band entered the mainstream, then their latest,

Narrow Stairs

, is their break out and go wild album.

It's on eight-and-a-half minute epic

I Will Possess Your Heart

(YouTube video below) where they're at their most crazy.

The first five minutes are free of vocals as it works up to a psychedelic shuffle, then dives back to normality when singer Benjamin Gibbard comes in, with his voice that's a mix of boy-next-door meets Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant.

Elsewhere Cath

... surges with a steely electric energy,

Pity and Fear

is as raucous as DCFC get, and Gibbard's meandering stories are unusual and rivetting.

"We bought some wine and some paper cups, near your daughter's school and picked her up, and drove to a cemetery on a hill,' he sings on

Grapevine Fires

and on

Your New Twin Sized Bed

he recounts a friend's broken relationship. But don't expect any cheeriness from Gibbard, whose opening line is ``You look so defeated lying there in your new twin-sized bed.'

While

Narrow Stairs

is typically dark and melancholic, Gibbard and band are not as earnest as they have been in the past and it's raw rather than overwrought.

Scott Kara