Scared to Death Cab

Predictably, Death Cab's latest album "Narrow Stairs" is huge. And why wouldn't it be? Thanks to in part Seth Cohen, the little group that could from Washington state provided the soundtrack for members of a generation that cringe at the overt earnestness of suicide icons like Kurt Cobain and prefer their musical sincerity subtle, clever and identifiable -- no easy feat.

Some bands are great because they are so consciously complex. Radiohead is like this, and they are really all the better for being so. The very construction of complexity that Radiohead embodies is why Chuck Klosterman can postulate so effectively that their album "Kid A" somehow mirrored the events of 9/11 even though the album was released in October of 2000 -- because they are exactly the kind of band who could function as an inadvertent Nostradamus.

But Death Cab is great because they can accomplish everything they want to so simply. Look, for example, at my favorite track from the new album, "Your New Twin Sized Bed". No ten-minute guitar solo. No wailing emotional pleas. Just the idea that sometimes the most banal stuff, like having to downsize beds, can be the most powerful.

I am an obvious Death Cab aficionado. This is why the prospect of interviewing them, which I am scheduled to do in the very near future, terrifies me. What to ask? Obviously, I want to dupe them into thinking that I am credible and qualified to interview them, but revealing how much I know about the band would certainly cast me as some sort of slobbering, obsessed fan.*

*which, to be fair, i am

I hate asking about the meaning of songs, because the last time I offered my well-thought out, highly informed opinion that a certain band's track was about war and the coming apocalypse, I was kindly told that he band was about two of the singer's friends who were in a rocky (but not apocalyptic) relationship. Oh. To make that same sort of ninth-grader-analyzing-sonnets brand mistake with Death Cab just can't be in the cards.

I'll provide a postmortem on the interview after the fact. For now, check out the aforementioned track, "Your New Twin Sized Bed".