Crooked Teeth

There's a wryness to this song that catches you slightly off guard within the Death Cab catalog — not quite humor, but something approaching it, a lightness in the guitar riff that bounces rather than aches. The production on Plans was the most polished the band had achieved to that point, and here that cleanliness serves the song's emotional register: this is not a devastated breakup song but something more complicated and ultimately more adult, an acknowledgment of incompatibility delivered without cruelty. The central metaphor — imperfection as something fixed rather than something to overcome — gives the song its unusual emotional shape. Gibbard sings with a matter-of-factness that feels evolved from the more tortured delivery of earlier records, as though he's arrived at a kind of equanimity about human limitation, his own included. The rhythm section provides a gentle forward momentum, nothing aggressive, and the whole track has the feel of someone exhaling after a long period of held breath. By 2005, Death Cab had crossed into mainstream consciousness — this album went platinum — and Crooked Teeth sits at that intersection between the band's indie origins and their newfound reach, accessible without being diluted. You listen to this when you're processing the end of something without quite enough grief to justify a sadder song, when you've arrived at the clear-eyed assessment that two people simply didn't fit, and that clarity, while not painless, is at least honest — and honesty, the song suggests, is its own quiet relief.