"There will be no more songs like 'What Sarah Said" give ... "

So it was to read in advance and made it their first fears wide, the next album would be bursting with noise and distortion so old-school. Does it sometimes even, but well-measured, one might say almost with a fine sense. So it is a bit noisy towards the end of the opener "Bixby Canyon Bridge" and the penultimate song "Pity And Fear" ends abruptly in a wall-of-noise, but only to the last song, where everything and everyone melting heartbreak song "The Ice Is Getting Thinner "to bring a passe-partout.

The texts and characters on this album are more differentiated, well-designed, profound, and even ironically. If you want the protagonist of "You Can Do Better Than Me" Remove this expression seriously? Or who can identify with the stalker from "I Will Possess Your Heart"? Ben Gibbard focuses on this album not only themselves, although of course this aspect is not neglected.
Bixby Canyon Bridge is, for example, a place from which he expected something special, because one of his idols there often spent, and how it can be of course only to be disappointed.

Musically, the album, like its predecessors, far from the "buy-me--Purchase me!" - Mentality convinced by angularity, maladjustment (see the 4-minute intro of the first single "I Will Possess Your Heart ") and a slightly melancholic mood, which one can hardly escape. It is for the listener initially certainly not an easy album, but with each listening test another dimension to the song is visible or audible. While not as smooth as produced the milestone "plan", but catchy, in his own way.
Also in the mode of production itself they worked completely different than before, the song "Talking Bird" with the exception of a guitar completely recorded live and rarely takes were canceled.

It also testifies to the courage of this band, no longer working with ear popular piano riffs and instead to put the guitar back to the fore, distorting them and roar to let the borders of the songs away. Between songs rarely there is silence, because all the songs give aneinandergereit a fixed order of play.

A recommendation for "Album of the Year 2008".