Death Cab For Cutie - I Built You A Tower
Ben Gibbard has been going through it. Whether you are a long-time Death Cab For Cutie listener or just joining them here on their eleventh album, I Built You a Tower, it’s evident throughout each song that he’s dealing with loss. Gibbard, the lead vocalist and guitarist of the band, noted that this album was written and recorded as a response to his recent divorce. I Built You A Tower moves between every stage of grief with aplomb, from the opening acoustic notes of “Full of Stars” to the dreamlike closing title track. Gibbard sings on the opening track “I tried to mend these broken fences/You claimed I’d build a wall/That’d I’d obstructed all your exists/As if my aim all along/Was to keep you somewhere/You no longer wished to be”, and the emotional gravity is impactful. His voice is mild-mannered in every song, yet you feel the weight behind each word.
There is no way to misinterpret it; every song on I Built You A Tower is about Gibbard’s divorce and the ruminations that come with grief and the acceptance of this massive change in life. It switches to a third-person narrative on “Punching The Flowers”, the upbeat alt-rock lead single that reflects on what seems to be the harsher parts of the separation by using imagery like “the sound of slamming doors” and “punching the flowers” to make its point. “Pep Talk” finds Gibbard in a lonely state (“And now I find I’m waking up at sunrise, and just lying in bed/Giving myself a pep talk to survive the day lying ahead”) before leading into the shoegazy title track, which features both an (a) and (b) version that each occupy a different half of the album.
One of the strengths of Gibbard and Death Cab as songwriters is their ability to take something as oft written about as a break-up/divorce and turn it into poetry. A fight is not a fight on a Death Cab album, it’s “You raised your voice more and more/Into a scream, into a scream/Spraying bullets of grievances/Carelessly, carelessly” (“Envy The Birds”). Depression isn’t depression, it s “a fog San Francisco couldn’t handle” (“Stone Over Water”). “How Heavenly A State” finds the band in one of its more uptempo moments on I Built You A Tower, as Gibbard finds himself almost surrendering and accepting his situation, guitar feedback ringing out into the ether as he makes this realization. He dives even further into this acceptance on “Trap Door”, pledging himself to the misery with lines like “You can lock me in its cage/But if only winners write history/There will be nothing on our page”.
“Riptides” is almost anthemic in nature while reflecting on the overwhelming nature of everything in his orbit, while “The Flavor of Metal” finds Gibbard at his darkest. He’s accepted his fate, but he’s miserable. A plucky bass line and reverby guitars accentuate lines like “And the only truth I’ve ever found/Is that everything that ascends will soon come crashing down”. By the time we get to “I Built You A Tower (b)”, he’s exhausted. The line “I’m learning how to live without you” sums up everything that I Built You A Tower is supposed to be: a meditation on denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Grief can take the energy out of anyone; I Built You A Tower is Death Cab For Cutie processing grief and watching it sap the life out of Gibbard in full-on stereophonic sound. It’s sad to listen to, yet emotionally cathartic. By the end of the nearly forty-minute album, you’re emotionally drained. It’s impossible not to be.
