There’s completely different tiers of grief: the self-induced (watching your property group’s first-ever World Collection look slip by their mitts by one recreation), the tragic (a wedding dissolving regardless of weathering a claustrophobic pandemic), and the unspeakable (the deaths of family members, taken in a flash or drawn out over years). In recent times, Ben Gibbard, considered one of indie rock’s prevailing figureheads, has unwittingly endured all three. That a lot is evident on I Constructed You a Tower, Dying Cab for Cutie’s first album in 4 years. Sorrow has all the time been a songwriting wellspring for Gibbard, who constructed his band’s repute on a capability to kind tangled ache into distinctive talismans: styrofoam plates, loaned letter jackets, and the formation of the Atlantic Ocean. As he’s aged right into a extra steady grownup, Dying Cab for Cutie’s songs have equally mellowed out. Nonetheless, this newest batch of hardships, notably a divorce from his longtime spouse, pushed Gibbard to a spot of such exhaustion that he’s virtually come full circle to his youthful, extra overwhelmed self—and with it, his finest musical impulses in a decade.
Regardless of compartmentalizing these issues, Gibbard couldn’t admit their compounding weight till 2023, when he began heave-crying halfway by a 100-mile ultramarathon in volcanic mountains; shaking and puffy-eyed, he tapped out. It’s a sentiment echoed on “Riptides,” the place he confesses: “I’m too drained to finish the battle/And I can’t appear to carry it collectively.” I Constructed You a Tower reckons with the second that agony begins to spill over, however with out invoking a sufferer complicated or the wounded limping of previous narrators. Gibbard hides from rain, opts for Irish goodbyes, and resorts to giving himself pep talks to tug himself off the bed. His physique retains the rating, however his age grants a brand new perspective: “How heavenly a state/The acceptance of collapsing,” he later sings, and means it.
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But that weariness doesn’t plague the music itself. Dying Cab for Cutie spent the 2010s drifting by meandering electronics, stilted lyrics, and toothless indie-pop, solely to rebound with inventive momentum in 2022 with Asphalt Meadows. They made that report, partially, by revisiting four-tracks from 1996 and utilizing their new perspective to deconstruct these outdated songs. All through I Constructed You a Tower, Dying Cab for Cutie revive the craving that propelled their unique indie rock, alongside an insatiable focus and starvation for extra: gnarled post-punk in “How Heavenly a State,” ambient synth-pop in “Entice Door,” twinkling guitars in “Punching the Flowers.” Nick Harmer swings his bass like white-knuckled punches and rakes traces by filth on these songs, rivaling his command on Slim Stairs. It’s the closest Dying Cab for Cutie have sounded to their golden period for the reason that 2014 departure of guitarist and producer Chris Walla, whereas nonetheless reflecting the mature band standing within the current.
The uncomplicated nature of the songs on I Constructed You a Tower means the report glints with hallmarks of the band’s early period: that dejected guitar melody over cymbal hiccups on “I Constructed You a Tower (A)” resembles We Have the Information and We’re Voting Sure; the drum machine behind bleary synth in “Stone Over Water” might go for One thing About Airplanes with cleaner manufacturing. Even their pop instincts get punched up in “The Taste of Steel” with the intuitiveness of Plans. This high quality isn’t a results of nostalgia bait, finding out outdated tapes, or the band’s practically two-year-long anniversary tour for Transatlanticism, however the truth that this present iteration of the group—Gibbard, Harmer, drummer Jason McGerr, guitarist-keyboardist Dave Depper, and multi-instrumentalist Zac Rae—prefers a less-is-more method. After a number of data of muted concepts, Dying Cab for Cutie sound emboldened once more whereas recalling the songwriting traits that when set them aside in a sea of indie-rock bands who’ve since petered out.
