Death Cab for Cutie, O2 Academy Brixton

It’s not so much cultural differences that have hindered Death Cab for Cutie’s UK profile, it’s more the difficulty of making a name when “there just couldn’t be less scandal surrounding the band”. Or so guitarist Chris Walla feels. In the States their beautiful, emotionally muted music goes platinum and is featured in huge shows like the OC. But just as US audiences were hard to persuade of the charms of Pulp or Suede, so Death Cab’s strangely moving introspection has been here, by and large, niche. You’d never have known it, though, from the legions of fashionably dressed devotees at the Academy last night.

Earlier in the day, theartsdesk caught up with Walla and drummer Jason McGerr to ask them about the new album, Codes and Keys. Death Cab’s seventh album is a departure for the band, having swapped their “two guitars, bass and drums, recorded on the floor” sound for something more atmospheric and synth-driven. Dressed in a check shirt and canvas shoes Walla explained how it was recorded in seven studios over five cities in 10 months.

With the band living in cities across the States “the original idea was to record two weeks in each city so that each one of us got to stay at home for at least some portion of the recording”. In the end they restricted recording to the West Coast, but the various locations, the colours of the walls, and the time off between recordings helped them evolve a new sonic palette. “That,” said Walla, “and the idea of treating the guitar more as punctuation and like end-seasoning rather than the main ingredient."

Last night’s gig was the last in a mini-tour of Europe. “It’s really been gangbusters,” Walla enthused. Still, hardly what they are used to in the States? Maybe this is because they are wrong sort of people to play into British celebrity culture. “We go on stage dressed in our street clothes, and there’s no mountains of drugs and bar brawls. Boiling us down to a sound-bite comes out ‘they’re just four regular guys in a band’” Not quite “regular”, though. Lead singer Ben Gibbard recently married Hollywood über-pixie Zooey Deschanel.

And it seems it has turned him from a cynical-yet-romantic young songwriter with a slightly nasal voice to a much more grizzly and emotional creature. In fact last night the whole band took their sound to a much more muscular, visceral level than we are used to hearing on the records. It started with the brooding synths, early U2-style bass and sinister atmosphere of “I Will Possess Your Heart”, segued into a grand rock version of “The New Year”, and by the time we were into “We Laugh Indoors” with bassist Nick Harmer throwing rock poses and Walla (still wearing his check shirt) tracing the sky with guitar soundscapes, it was hard to believe the words lo-fi were ever associated with this band.

And for the most part, lo-fi didn’t show its face. When it did it was it was in juggernaut form such as on “Meet Me on the Equinox”, “Title and Registration” and a slightly turgid rendition of the classic “405”. But these are minor quibbles. Over the 25 songs played the quartet went from indie to pop to folk rock. The Band of Horses-esque "Codes and Keys" soared and "Doors Unlocked and Open" sounded not unlike the Doors. Judging by the furious tweeting at the end of the gig the band pushed and pulled the buttons of the 5.000 people present in a way that they'll be talking about till next Christmas.

As Walla had suggested earlier in the day, the band’s greatest strength is lead singer Gibbard’s “simple poignant universality as a songwriter” and his skill in “picking little moments out of a day and blowing them up into song form”. Those little observations brought the room together in shared imagination in “Photobooth”, and “Summer Skin” and when Gibbard took out his acoustic to perform the religiously weary, impossibly romantic “I Will Follow You Into the Dark”, several hundred couples sang it word for word to each other.

I really hadn’t expected the band to play this well, Gibbard to sing with such passion, or for the gig to be such an event. On record they can seem understated, cool and restrained. But by the time the song “Cath” came round, I improbably just had the words “epic” and “huge” on my notepad. If your exposure to the band is mainly through their college-movie-soundtrack style songs like “Sound of Settling” or “405”, then you should check out how they’ve grown if they return later this year.

There have been times when Death Cab’s greatest weakness has been sticking too closely to the formula. Codes and Keys however has been a triumph of expansiveness and variety. And so was last night. At their best the numbers were transporting, charged with a spectral identity and cinematographic sense of location. A welcome long way from the rain-sodden pound shops and fried chicken outside. And well worthy of a wider audience.

• Find Death Cab for Cutie on Amazon
• Download Death Cab for Cutie on iTunes
  

Watch Death Cab for Cutie's recent single, "You are a Tourist"