Death Cab for Cutie Kintsugi

When drummer Bill Berry left R.E.M., the band’s first album without him, 1998’s Up, felt unsteady and weighed down by the change. Death Cab for Cutie’s Kintsugi feels similarly burdened by the absence of an anchor bandmate, producer/multi-instrumentalist Chris Walla, who quit last year. Tempos range from plodding to midtempo, while sprawling songs like “Little Wanderer” and “Ingénue” lack crispness. Moreover, Kintsugi’s music, which encompasses chiming Brit-pop, feathery acoustic indie-folk and homages to ’80s synth-pop, mostly sounds dour and dragged down by melancholy, from the keyboard-swirled “Black Sun” to the elegiac “You’ve Haunted Me All My Life.” (Exceptions include the piano-driven “Binary Sea,” an allegorical condemnation of society’s document-everything mentality, and the upbeat “Good Help (Is So Hard to Find).”) What’s odd is that Walla was actually involved with Kintsugi’s creation, meaning the record wasn’t a reaction to his exit. Perhaps the stilted results hint that the band was bracing for it instead.