The sky’s the limit for Death Cab

Perhaps it’s the infamous weather that formed the Seattle-based Death Cab for Cutie’s sound… Perhaps it’s the infamous weather that formed the Seattle-based Death Cab for Cutie’s sound — Death Cab’s bassist Nick Harmer calls it “bittersweet melancholy.” The rainy, overcast cradle of grunge might, at first, seem like an odd place for a band with a penchant for creating music that straddles the fine line separating pop from emo — arguably the antithesis of something like Nirvana or Soundgarden.

But if you’ve spent any amount of time in Pittsburgh — a city with weather patterns similar to those in Seattle — you know how the gray, damp atmosphere can create those moody, mopey feelings of longing and “bittersweet melancholy.”

“It’s just kind of us, as people … there’s just as many good moments in life as there are bad moments in it,” Harmer said. “It’s coming to grips with growing older and getting mature and figuring out how to navigate through the world and keeping a sense of integrity.”

This is something Death Cab has done throughout its history, from its first album, Something About Airplanes, released in 1998, through its latest LP, Transatlanticism. Dripping off every lyric and note are feelings of coming to grips with age, time and navigation, be it through the geographic world — Transatlanticism explicitly refers to the distance between one side of the Atlantic to the other — or the inner one.

Harmer, though, doesn’t look at Death Cab’s sound as anything that strays too far from simple pop. “We’re not pushing any new boundaries as far as pop structure goes or making anything really radical and edgy that avant-garde jazz musicians will be talking about in 10 years, or anything like that,” Harmer said. “Our songs are pretty straightforward. We really spend a lot of time and a lot of care thinking about our songs.”

That proved to be especially the case when it came time to putting together Transatlanticism. Death Cab took a bit of a break between The Photo Album in 2001 and their latest album, which was released in late 2003.

For most bands, that two-year downtime wouldn’t be that big of a deal. That time might be spent touring or recording demos for a future album. Besides, few bands release more than an album every other year anymore. For the members of Death Cab, though, those two years were spent away from one another, creating side projects that, in certain cases, resonated just as much as anything they did with Death Cab.

The most notable example was Death Cab front man Ben Gibbard’s work with Postal Service. With that project, Gibbard sent lyrics in the mail to Jimmy Tamborello, who, in turn, sent Gibbard music back to create an album that influenced Death Cab’s approach to creating Transatlanticism.

“I think that, while this record doesn’t sound anything like the Postal Service record, sometimes, on a few of the songs, the approach to writing some of the material was similar,” Harmer said. “Ben would write the lyrics and the melody, and we’d be responsible for developing more of the musical aspects of it. That was new for us in Death Cab.”

Luckily, the success of the side projects like Postal Service wasn’t the death knell for the band. “Doing side projects has always been something that we’ve done in Death Cab,” Harmer said. “We’ve always made sure that we’ve taken time outside of the band to indulge ourselves in other projects.”

Anyway, the band needed a break.

After a tough couple of years of touring, the members of Death Cab began to wear out and tire to the point of becoming somewhat disillusioned. “We took a little bit of a break, and it was the perfect time for every one of us, individually, to recharge our engines and get really excited about making music and playing as Death Cab again.”

What resulted from the band’s hiatus was a record that Harmer says contains a level of texture and depth not heard on their previous release. “I’d say that The Photo Album is as close to a live album as we’ll ever get. The instrumentation is — not to use a pun — an exact snapshot of what we are live,” Harmer said.

On Transatlanticism, though, “one of our first credos was: ‘We’re not going to worry about how we’re going to perform these songs’,” Harmer added. “When we were making Transatlanticism, we just said, whatever the songs need, we’re going to do, and we’re not going to force anything on a particular song if it doesn’t call for it.” The resulting album is Death Cab at its bittersweet-melancholy best.

With an arsenal of such music, it might be hard to believe that a band like Death Cab could get more worn out on the road than most bands — it was a primary reason for their hiatus, after all. But their sound doesn’t betray their stage presence.

“We like to bring a lot of energy to the music, which probably surprises most people when they see us live, given the sort of melancholy quality of our records over the years,” Harmer said. “They expect our live shows to be us sort of standing in the shadows, looking at our feet, kind-of mopey. And that’s not the case at all. I’ve never seen a crowd pogo, and there’s no stage diving at our shows, but we do have a good time.”

As Death Cab tours and records more, band members find their crowds growing larger and larger. “I’m always really excited about anybody that comes to the shows or anyone who buys a record,” Harmer said. “And we’re always convinced that when we play a show or make a record that that’s the last one — it’s going to be over the next day, and no one’s going to like us anymore.”

This idea of everything ending for the band tomorrow has created, within Death Cab, a sense that they aren’t entitled to any amount of success, huge record sales or a gargantuan fan base. And they don’t have any expectation of it, either.

“If you would have asked me seven years ago where I saw this band, I don’t think I could have said here,” Harmer said. “It’s a super surprise. It’s great.”

Death Cab for Cutie plays Club Laga’s penultimate show on Thursday, along with Ben Kweller and Aveo. Doors open at 6 p.m., and the show starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are $15 in advance and $17 the day of the show. For more information, call (412) 323-1919.