On my 18th birthday, a boy gifted Death Cab for Cutie's Plans to me along with a letter confessing his true feelings for me. Irrelevant as this personal anecdote may seem, it says more about the album than any of the one liners I initially considered.
Plans is a beautiful collection of romantic angst and melancholic love songs. I remember being offended when my older brother described the music as "taking him back to his teenage years". Today, his feelings have become my own and Plans holds a special place in my music collection for the time it takes me back to.
The clarity of Ben Gibbbard's voice has remained consistent throughout his work with Death Cab for Cutie. It is best likened to that of Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend or Dan Croll's self-titled project. Soft indie rock is in perfect harmony with these vocals. While many of the songs on this album are driven by percussion, it is by no means an up tempo record. Elements such as the organ and strings in combination with the prominent acoustic guitar make for an emotive sound that is perhaps the mildest of Death Cab's work to date. While their most recent offerings have been considerably more extraverted, Plans offers a sense of peace that is absent in the band's other records.
The opening track, Marching Bands of Manhattan, takes me back to a bright, youthful hope, and I don't think this is unique to my own experience. Death Cab manages to layer different musical elements to create a depth that draws out emotion in its listeners. While I'll Follow You into the Dark is an understated acoustic love song, Summer Skin is a piano lead reflection of a past relationship and Your Heart is an Empty Room is a fast paced song about re-starting your life and the displacement of discontinuing old habits. Brothers on a Hotel Bed is a gentle description of the demise of a relationship, cushioned by the keys and a distant dissonant echo. This song holds the beautiful line, “But now he lives inside someone he does not recognize - when he catches his reflection on accident."
Soul Meets Body is home to the most poetic lyrics on the album, a favourite phrase of mine reading as follows:
"I do believe it's true that there are roads left in both of our shoes,
and if the silence takes me then I hope it takes you too"
This kind of dark-edged poetry characterises the album and keeps it from veering into the realm of cheesy ballads. This is a feature that is common to all of Death Cab for Cutie's more established work and in my opinion, is at its best in this album.
It is often the longevity of an album that shows what it is made of, and Plans has been a firm favourite of mine since I first discovered it in 2010. My only regret regarding this record, is that I didn't find it sooner.
