Love, divorce and rock 'n' roll
Frontman Ben Gibbard's personal life is front and centre on Death Cab for Cutie's new album
Ben Gibbard never thought he'd find himself where he did at the end of 2012.
The boyish frontman of Seattle's Death Cab for Cutie had spent the previous decade and a half establishing a reputation as one of the most sensitive - and hardest-working - figures in American indie rock. The band's music, moody but pretty, won devoted fans for its proud sense of vulnerability, and when Death Cab hit it big with 2005's million-selling Plans, the group's long-building success made them heroes to misfits everywhere.
By 2009, Gibbard's world had expanded to the point that he'd married actress-singer Zooey Deschanel and moved to Los Angeles, a city he'd blasted in an early Death Cab tune, Why You'd Want to Live Here. (Sample lyric: "You can't swim in a town this shallow.") Three years later, they were divorced, with Gibbard packing his things into his Prius for a return trip up Interstate 5. "I was like, 'Jesus Christ, man - did I just become the most stereotypical rock'n'roller ever?'" he recalls.
True to form, Gibbard, now 38, explores the nuances of that easily caricatured experience on Death Cab for Cutie's new album, Kintsugi. The band's first record since 2011's somewhat glazed-over Codes and Keys, it opens with No Room in Frame, in which the singer asks an unnamed ex: "Was I in your way when the cameras turned to face you?" Other songs mention an ingenue battling the passage of time and "a dumpster in the driveway of all the plans that came undone".
Yet Gibbard's divorce isn't the only break-up reflected on in Kintsugi, whose title refers to an ancient Japanese technique for repairing broken pottery. The album also follows the departure late last year of guitarist Chris Walla, who formed Death Cab with Gibbard in 1997 and produced the group's seven previous albums. He plays on Kintsugi, but for the first time the band utilised an outside producer in Rich Costey, who expanded Death Cab's sound with spacey synth textures and crisply propulsive beats. The result is a paradox: an account of emotional devastation that feels livelier than anything the band have done in ages.
