Death Cab for Cutie go from indie rock darlings to heart-on-the-sleeve headliners

The way he enunciates the word, stressing its lone syllable, letting it linger on the tongue like something meant to be savored, says as much as all the other words crowded around it.

“Feel.”

Nick Harmer delivers it with care, like the way you handle papier-mache, something easily damaged.

Harmer’s speaking of something equally fragile: a song in its infancy.

The Death Cab for Cutie bassist is talking about his band’s writing process, how he knows when a tune is worth developing.

_informq.push(['embed']);

“When I’m listening to a few demos that Ben (Gibbard, singer-guitarist) has sent my way, I really just kind of allow myself to react to them in real time,” Harmer says. “Some songs, even in their rawest form, really immediately create pictures in my mind and make me feel things.

“That’s always been the check for me: Does this song immediately resonate with me on an emotional level? If it does, then I put that in the ‘yes’ pile. It’s a real instinctual kind of thing.”

Said instinct is at the core of pretty much everything Death Cab does.

Since debuting 20 years ago, the band has steadily progressed from indie rock darlings to heart-on-the-sleeve headliners of large halls, Death Cab’s success rooted in the band’s skill at powering ornately crafted songs with emotions that are far less finely wrought, a contrast of the intricate and the unadorned.

It begins with Gibbard’s voice, stirring and tender, an instrument capable of taking the edge off even the prickliest of sentiments.

.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }

It’s a thing of reassurance, a hand on the shoulder, Gibbard’s words mirroring the warmth of his timbre.

“Someone’s gotta be the lighthouse,” he sings on “Little Wanderer” from Death Cab’s latest record, “Kintsugi.” “And that someone’s gotta be me.”

In the song, Gibbard’s addressing a globe-trotting lover, but that lyric could just as well be applied to anyone listening.

There are myriad emotions mined in Death Cab’s catalog, but ultimately, the band’s eight records all have a heartening feel to them, a measure of solace amid all the uncertainty Gibbard addresses.

“There is an answer in a question / And there is hope within despair / And there is beauty in a failure / And there are depths beyond compare,” Gibbard sings on “Black Sun,” also from “Kintsugi,” encapsulating Death Cab’s reason for being, in a roundabout way.

“What we’ve always tried to do is just be really honest — and I’ve always been proud of Ben as a lyricist for this, he’s open and honest about what he’s feeling, what he’s thinking, where he’s at in life.”

All of this is trickier than it sounds. Giving voice to big emotions often carries similarly outsize risks: Songbooks as candid as Death Cab’s too often get mired in the maudlin. It’s easy to fall prey to lyrics that seem cribbed from Hallmark cards. It’s hard to distill complex emotions in a way that doesn’t dumb down the depth of feeling.

“Our songs are always going to be about the tumult of living, those emotions that come up when you’re in love and out of love, when you’re feeling close to people and when you’re not feeling close to people,” Harmer explains. “I know certainly for us the thing that we concern ourselves with the most is that we feel the empathy and the compassion and the connectivity in our music — and also with the audience that’s listening.

“That kind of connection, that magical thing that happens when you’re playing a song and people are feeling it too is amazing. It’s so powerful.”

This power can be heightened by the times.

Times like the present.

“In the context of the world right now, a simple song about yearning to be close to someone could almost be a political statement,” Harmer says. “That just speaks to where we’re at in the world and how divided a lot of people feel. I think we’re always going to seek ways to close those divides and make people understand the ways that we’re actually more similar than we are different. That’s important to us.

“If that’s a political action these days, then so be it.”

Read more from Jason Bracelin at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com and follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.