Elegantly expressed emotional turmoil unfolds across 11 cleverly crafted songs in this 11th album by the Seattle indie rock band fronted by Ben Gibbard and produced by the brilliant John Congleton around a metaphor for post-marriage grief. The tower in question comes in two songs, (a) and (b) and capture the obsessive walls that grief can create: “I built you a tower / A tower in my mind / A place that no one else / No one else would ever find …” sings Gibbard around a circular, steady guitar riff and melody in a), while a noisier, more dynamic full range in b) begins to come to terms with the patterned behaviour and “learning to live without you”, yet “I thought that I could keep you locked away / That in this soundless spire was where you'd stay / But there was no cage or shape/ That you could not escape / What a fool I was to think I was safe.” But there are even stronger songs across the album, particular the directionless anger described in Punching The Flowers, a rare example of a DCFC songwritten in the third person and a series of metaphors tripping over each other: “In his search / For the end of the circle / He kept arriving back at the start/ Having fell every hurdle … It always seemed he was punching the flowers / Ruminating like a fatalist for hours / With a voice like the sound of slamming doors.” Riptides is perhaps the best of the bunch, with a steady beat and thrumming bass line and rising guitar riff that then explodes into the chorus, a tidy tune capturing the ins and outs and undulations of how emotional exhaustion and grief wears you down: “I say goodbye without opening my mouth /I just stare into the distance til you figure it out /‘Cause I feel /As invested as a border guard /Who’s seen too many people leaving /To take it too hard.”
Envy The Birds captures the echoes of painful rows and arguments: “You raised your voice more and more/ Into a scream, into a scream / Spraying bullets of grievances / Carelessly, carelessly/ It took so long to get nowhere/ It got so loud, it got so loud/ And in my mind I disappeared / Into the clouds, into the clouds … And how I envy the birds I envy the birds / Soaring in the silence. Another striking number, one of 90 roughly written songs in a pool of was actually picked by Congleton - Stone Over Water, a stripped back keyboard-based number with another original metaphor: “Every day I awake like a stone over water / Skipping across a lake before I sink to the bottom / And how I wish I could say that I'm immune to the mirror / With temples fading to grey, I'm seeing the end drawing nearer.” Dark in subject matter, but uplifting in sound, a strong evocation of how Gibbard built a tower as he dismantles himself, while ultimately acknowledging the growth that comes alongside the pain of falling apart. Out on ANTI- Records.
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