Description:
After hearing Narrow Stairs earlier this week, it turns out that everything I had known about Death Cab was wrong. They are actually a really great band, and Stairs is unquestionably the best thing they`ve ever done. It`s a ballsy, brave effort, sonically every bit as dissonant and sanguine as you have heard, full of songs that thrash and rattle and bounce around echo chambers, tunes that display muscle and bravado and even brains. Lyrically, Ben Gibbard -- who had always erred on the literal side a bit too much for my tastes -- goes to places he`s never visited before, documenting the harrowing (and often unspoken) truths that course through our brains when we`re trapped in dying relationships or dead-end lives. It`s terrifying and unsettling and liberating all at once -- a record that sounds like a band throwing caution to the wind and just going for it, which makes it everything you could possibly ask for from a group of musicians, and an early contender for the best album of 2008. -- James Montgomery, mtv.com
