Album Review: The Open Door [EP] by Death Cab for Cutie

"Little Bribes" throws the doors wide with Chris Walla's blues-fueled licks that alternatively melt into reverb and dance off in detailed frets. Gibbard's first line, "The Eiffel Tower built to smaller scale, the freshest oxygen I ever inhaled," floats atop the scorching riffs. While Narrow Stairs began with descent ("I descended a dusty gravel ridge"), The Open Door begins atop a tower.

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Arriving one year after the release of Narrow Stairs, the five-song Open Door EP pairs four abandoned tracks from the Narrow Stairs sessions with a ukulele-helmed demo of "Talking Bird. " Although it's certainly a stopgap recording -- released just before the bandmates' final tour in support of Narrow Stairs, and intended to maintain their popularity throughout the subsequent retreat to the recording studio -- Open Door is also a strong display of Death Cab's literate, poetry-major pop, with fast tempos and bright melodies that sometimes contrast Narrow Stairs' autumnal moments. These once-discarded tracks don't sound any less tuneful than the band's recent output; "Little Bribes," in particular, could have bumped a lesser song off of the Narrow Stairs track list with its power pop bounce, while "My Mirror Speaks" wields a winsomely ascending chorus that finds Ben Gibbard reaching into his falsetto.

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I thought Death Cab For Cutie’s seventh album, Narrow Stairs, was one of the overlooked LPs from last year when it came round to compiling the annual best of lists. And I think the reason is that many people simply overlooked or ignored it because it was a Death Cab For Cutie album. Ever since Adam Brody name-dropped them one too many times on the OC, a majority of fans abandoned the band.

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Ever since Death Cab frontman Ben Gibbard got engaged to Zooey Deschanel - one of the most desirable women in indie music and film - his songs of lost love, mourning and regret have gotten harder to swallow. Surely Gibbard's life is a lot rosier these days. [rssbreak] This five-song EP of leftovers from the Narrow Stairs sessions might've been written pre-Deschanel, so we'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

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