Codes and Keys
With *Codes and Keys* Death Cab for Cutie turn on their heart light. Singer Ben Gibbard is now happily married to actress Zooey Deschanel and his worldview has gotten notably brighter. The band has also shifted the sound from guitars to analog synths that when mixed by Alan Moulder, the man who gave My Bloody Valentine and Nine Inch Nails a stronger definition, turns the group into an arena-rock superpower. “Doors Unlocked and Open” is a swerving piece of club music. “Some Boys” is an explosion of joy as Gibbard instructs, “Some boys don’t know how to love.” But he does. “You Are a Tourist” takes an indie-rock band and raises the recording budget until Death Cab sound like a mainstream radio-pop band. For modern day AOR, check “Unobstructed Views” with its sweet wonder of reverb and keyboards. “Stay Young, Go Dancing” shuffles with a kind hope while “Underneath the Sycamore” retains shades of power-pop as it dances in a bucolic light.
Death Cab are experimenting on their latest full-length, focusing less on tunes and melody and more on electronic sound.
Ben Gibbard had a lot to get out of his system between Death Cab For Cutie’s 2008 record, Narrow Stairs, and its latest release, Codes And Keys. Namely, whatever personal demons inspired Narrow Stairs, a return to Death Cab’s dependable early-’00s form that plays, at turns, as cathartic, spiteful, and remorseful. It…
To celebrate their first new release since 2009 and their seventh studio album, Codes and Keys , Death Cab for Cutie will…
Codes and Keys, released three years after Narrow Stairs and two years after his marriage to Deschanel, paints a brighter picture.
The band's best work to date...Considered one of emo music’s true originators, alongside the likes of Jimmy Eat World and Incubus, before the genre took a poppy turn and got a tad bit more emotional , Death Cab For Cutie are now deemed one of rock’s most innovative bands.
Perfection is the goal for Death Cab for Cutie. One listen to its seventh album, Codes and Keys, reveals a band as conscious as ever of the power of the studio.
Death Cab for Cutie's seventh album is full of bittersweet melodies, but fails to convince <strong>Ally Carnwath</strong>
Thanks in no small part to Death Cab, there’s now a permanent niche for indie pop that’s smart, sad, and refined, and Codes and Keys fills it nicely.
Winsome US indie has a hard time grabbing British audiences. Could this be the album that changes all that, asks <strong>Alexis Petridis</strong>
Death Cab for Cutie - Codes and Keys review: So this is the new Death Cab, and I don't feel any different.