Death Cab for Cutie – The Photo Album (2001)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 38:55 minutes | 768 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Barsuk Records

Released in 2000, We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes delivered on the promise of You Can Play These Songs with Chords and Something About Airplanes. For once, a band’s popularity grew commensurate with its maturation. Despite the heightened attention, singer/songwriter/guitarist Ben Gibbard next let loose Death Cab for Cutie’s finest moment, “Photobooth,” the lead track on the sparkling Forbidden Love EP. New fans worldwide swooned under its beguiling romantic rise ‘n’ fall and its lingering, bittersweet, wallet-sized artifact. And though it wouldn’t have killed them to include “Photobooth” here — for its spotless greatness and thematic likeness — The Photo Album’s ten tracks are of the EP’s heightened caliber. Gibbard’s words screen intriguing mini-films of the mind, stoked by corresponding daydreamy music. An exquisite liaison of the British penchant for ringing, knelling, subconscious guitars and direct/grittier American drive, the band is tight, evocative, and inventive. Bassist Nick Harmer and drummer Michael Schorr lock in creative rhythmic bases, while Gibbard and Chris Walla’s guitar work gives the band climactic, cinematic coloring shades. And, in the end, it’s Gibbard’s remarkable abilities as a writer and singer that are on display most. Each word draws you in via his sweet, thoughtful guy voice. The solo 1:47 opener, “Steadier Footing,” is merely a starter course, but it feels like an entrée: “And this is the chance I never got/To make a move, but we just talk” is only one measure of the chances/plans/dreams/connections and relationships that have eluded him or fizzled. Reeled in, one is left to look back over one’s own smoldering wreckage, of opportunities or attachments lost — much as “A Movie Script Ending”‘s abrupt turn “Passing through unconscious states/When I awoke I was on the highway” somehow segues into the couplet “With your hands on my shoulders/A meaningless movement, a movie script ending.” Like “Photobooth,” it’s a typically sobering, adverse assessment of how unromantic the romanticized can become. That it’s a great pop song, arresting in its jerky wobble, is just another point in its, and this LP’s, favor. The world needs more superb pop with brains and heart and emotional complexity. –Jack Rabid

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Death Cab For Cutie – The Georgia EP (2020/2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 17:40 minutes | 200 MB | Genre: Alternative, Indie Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Atlantic Records

8x GRAMMY Award nominees Death Cab for Cutie have today announced plans for The Georgia E.P. – a 5-track EP set for release. The tracklist for the EP includes never-before-heard new covers of TLC, R.E.M., Neutral Milk Hotel, Cat Power, and Vic Chesnutt and seeks to recognize and support the organization leading up to the Georgia runoffs and in honor of their work throughout the entire 2020 election cycle.

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Death Cab for Cutie – The Blue EP (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 20:53 minutes | 441 MB | Genre: Alternative, Indie
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Atlantic Records

Released just a year after the full-length Thank You for Today, 2019’s The Blue EP finds Death Cab for Cutie benefitting from working with a smaller canvass. The central tune of this five-track EP is “Kids in 99,” a song written in tribute to three children who died in an explosion on the Olympic Pipeline in 1999. It has clean lines but a nervy energy, and its hushed outrage provides an emotional keystone for the record, which also contains the coiled “Before the Bombs.” Death Cab doesn’t depart from the cool textures and subtle melodies that distinguish Thank You for Today, but that added grace note of despair, outrage, and quiet urgency does give The Blue EP a subtle and welcome emotional resonance. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine

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Death Cab For Cutie – Thank You For Today (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 38:32 minutes | 842 MB | Genre: Indie
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Atlantic Records

Death Cab For Cutie’s eighth album, Kintsugi, highlighted the band’s multiple fractures. Guitarist Chris Walla was leaving the project and Ben Gibbard’s marriage was collapsing. Two divisions that led to a negative and burdensome atmosphere for the group, and to an interesting but rather dark album as a result. Three years later, the sad times finally seem to be over. Thank You for Today offers more cheerful aspects and unites the long-time teammates: Ben Gibbard, Nick Harmer, Jason McGerr and two studio partners, Dave Depper and Zac Rae. Like for Kintsugi, the album is produced and mixed by the talented Rich Costey, known for his productions of Muse, Franz Ferdinand and Fiona Apple. A strong background that comes through on the very first listen.

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Death Cab For Cutie – Plans (2005/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 44:24 minutes | 500 MB | Genre: Alternative
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Atlantic Records

“Plans” is the fifth studio album by indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie. “Plans” is a shockingly beautiful and mature album from a group that itself is still maturing. Death Cab for Cutie is that rare band that aren’t afraid to tackle the big thought, to wrestle with the complex, never black and white realities of human interaction. From its soaring beginning to its somber end, ‘Plans’ is the sound of growing up, of gaining friends and losing them, of realising, perhaps for the first time, the weight and consequences of every decision we make, of every heart we touch. It is an album about growing old that can grow old with us.

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Death Cab For Cutie – Kintsugi (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 45:10 minutes | 999 MB | Genre: Indie Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Atlantic Records

KINTSUGI, which follows 2011s GRAMMY Award-nominated CODES AND KEYS marks Death Cab for Cutie s first new album since the departure last year of founding guitarist/keyboardist/producer Chris Walla. Recorded in Los Angeles with Rich Costey (Franz Ferdinand, Muse, Interpol) behind the board, the album takes its title from the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with precious metals like gold, silver, and platinum, highlighting cracks rather than hiding them. As such, kintsugi represents a compassionate aesthetic philosophy in which damage and wear are embraced as part of an objects history.

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Death Cab for Cutie – Codes and Keys (2011/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 45:09 minutes | 502 MB | Genre: Alternative Rock, Indie Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Atlantic Records

Codes and Keys is the seventh studio album by Death Cab for Cutie. By their 7th studio album, many bands are running out of creative steam and original ideas. But in the case of Death Cab for Cutie, nothing could be further from the truth. Codes and Keys is singular in the quartet’s catalog when it comes to sonic exploration and lyrical ambition. If anything, the band has never sounded more excited to experiment with textures, words, sounds and even the process of recording itself.

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