Music

Death Cab for Cutie find home on 'Codes and Keys'

by Nicole Villeneuve

It’s the first and only day Toronto’s been without rain in what feels like weeks, and the four members of Death Cab for Cutie have taken over the bright top floor of a nightclub’d downtown bowling alley for the morning. The night previous, they played a small (for them) stage on a pre-album release preview tour before returning to Canada to headline stadium shows this summer.

Since cracking the mainstream with 2003’s Transatlanticism, the Bellingham, Washington natives have smoothly transitioned into a large-scale rock band while successfully maintaining ties to their indie-cool past. On their excellent new album Codes and Keys (out today) the band sounds the same but different; heartfelt and wistful, but sophisticated and spacious. As guitarist Chris Walla tells AUX, the recording process this time around had everything to do with the new direction.

“The whole idea with the last record [Narrow Stairs] was to get as much of it live as we could,” Walla says. “This record, the idea was to drag it around kicking and screaming from studio to studio and try and get it to be comfortable in a bunch of different places.”

Recorded in two week spurts with three weeks off in between sessions, Codes and Keys ended up being recorded in eight different studios along the west coast throughout 2010, including stints in Vancouver, Seattle, Hollywood, Portland, and San Francisco. It was produced as usual by Walla, who has produced and mixed everything in the band’s catalogue, in addition to albums by Tegan and Sara, The Thermals, and the Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie. This time, though, Walla took a step back on mixing duties (though he did do the album’s two openers, “Home Is A Fire” and the title track), handing Codes and Keys over instead to renowned mixer Alan Moulder.

“I’d met Alan and hung out with him a little bit, but I didn’t know how it was going to go as a working relationship, or personally, or how collaborative it would be or how involved I would be,” Walla says. He packed up and went to London while the rest of the band somewhat nervously waited for emails with mixes every morning. Walla sat in on the sessions with Moulder, but stayed hands-off, for the most part, saying he “sort of just went to school for five weeks.”

With a recording process that was broken up across weeks and states, both Walla and drummer Jason McGerr insist that keeping the final product a cohesive idea wasn’t even in their minds until the recording was more or less complete. When it came time to assemble the pieces into something whole, Walla credits singer/songwriter Ben Gibbard for making it easy.

“The cohesion on the record ultimately comes from Ben’s songs, and his voice. That’s the big unifying factor,” he says. “He’s a really clear-voiced writer, and kind of an astonishing singer these days. That gives the rest of us as a band a lot of freedom to present the songs in any number of different ways. It’s not terribly hard to tie it all together really.”

McGerr agrees, going so far as to call Gibbard the glue of the band. “I’d say he’s kind of like a big tube of glue. We can be more fearless, and put a really diverse batch of songs together, knowing that there is the big tube of glue at the end of the day.”

Codes and Keys could easily be called the band’s strongest since Transatlanticism; it’s also somewhat incomparable, standing as a touchstone and directive in the band’s career. They’ve largely forsaken guitars in favour of vintage analog keyboards, and in so doing have put the strong songwriting and deep band dynamic out on full display. It’s overall bright and optimistic, but not always on the surface, hinting at influences like LCD Soundsystem or Brian Eno. Over and over, images of transience and home appear, a loose concept that Walla says was fitting for everybody in the band over the past few years.

“Ben wrote a bunch of songs that I think we all really connected with in probably really different ways. As we all get married or break up, and move to or from different cities, and buy or sell houses and move into or out of rental places, and travel and all that sort of thing, home means really different things to everybody. It’s a really powerful, grounding sort of concept.”

McGerr expands on the concept of home as more than just a place to live. “The amount of time we took off in between really made us recognize that this band is a home for us as well,” he says, not only tying together the themes of the conversation, but possibly offering up a key insight into the success of Codes and Keys, and the band as a whole.

“Stage is a home for us, the studio is a home for us. We just listen to each other that much more, we leave more space for each other. It’s just a very unified, confident period to be making this record.”