I Built You A Tower

This is perhaps Death Cab for Cutie’s best record in a decade. It’s haunted by Ben Gibbard’s divorce, and the title is his image for compartmentalising grief: a tower to lock the marriage away in while the band toured old albums for their twentieth anniversaries. The tower is also a cage. On ‘Full of Stars’ she accuses him of walling her in, and by ‘I Built You a Tower (a)’ he’s trying to keep her inside it, and failing.

Gibbard has said he wouldn’t make Kintsugi, his first divorce record, again. This time he set out to leave the bitterness behind, and no single party carries the blame here. It opens with an apology and closes with a kind of acceptance: he’s getting used to life without her, and still thinks about little else. His sighing, plaintive voice suits these lyrics.

The band sound punchier than they have for a while. Bassist Nick Harmer and drummer Jason McGerr are on fine form and sit well in the mix. The whole thing was recorded in only three weeks, the five of them in one room, but nothing sounds rushed. You get the sense Gibbard walked into the studio knowing exactly what to do with these songs. ‘Stone Over Water’, a song about convincing everyone you’re fine, combines its introspective lyrics with a very catchy chorus: “I’m trying to hold it together / Trying to take the first step”. You almost believe him.