Music review: The Ice is Getting Thinner

It's about time I started writing about music again. Note to readers: I tend not to listen to albums until they've been out for a while; it's not on purpose, but I simply don't have a ton of time to listen to things anymore and when I want to listen to something, I really like to sit down and listen with my full attention. So sometimes it takes me a while to discover songs that came out months ago. But good music is timeless, right?

"The Ice is Getting Thinner" is the exquisitely devastating finale of Death Cab For Cutie's latest album, Narrow Stairs. The analogy isn't subtle; in the first person, it compares the slow deterioration of a romantic relationship to the inevitable melting of ice in the spring. DCFC is known for depicting the melancholy, but this is perhaps the darkest and most despairing we've seen from the band. A solo bass provides both the relentless ostinato bassline and the primary harmonic line to Ben Gibbard's baritone melody, forming sparse minimal chords that are quite unlike the multi-layered complexity we've come to expect from DCFC. The choice of instrumentation helps shape the desolate landscape of the song: first, the range of notes available to Gibbard and his accompaniment is limited to low clusters. Second, the thin instrumentation is really an intimate duet between voice and bass, adding to the sense of loneliness that encapsulates the lyrics so well.

The only glimpse of light we see occurs in the bridge. For a moment, we move into a major key area, and the bass stops its mechanical accompaniment and assumes the more traditional bass role as a guitar appears and plucks arpeggios above Gibbard's vocals: the first treble-range sounds of the song. For two short measures, we anticipate a happy lift as Ben sings "as Spring arrived." However, the next line, "we were taken by surprise," does indeed bring us a surprise, but instead of an uplifting turn, we encounter a crushing chromatic shift developing into a downward circle of fifths that spirals us back to where we began, except this time we find ourselves even deeper despair as the bass strums muddled clustered chimes on its lowest open string while the guitar performs a wailing solo with pitch bends that mimic human cries.

Dramatic? Yes. Too much? Perhaps, but even if you find the aesthetic too overbearing, you can't deny that the concept and execution of this recording is beautiful in its simplicity and almost too painful to listen through.