Death Cab seduction

Death Cab For Cutie

Narrow Stairs

Atlantic Records

Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard is known for being a literary songwriter, and on “Narrow Stairs” — the band’s sixth full-length album — he employs the device of the unreliable narrator. The 11 songs look at love from an obsessive, off-kilter perspective of a spurned romance-seeker trying to impute thoughts and feelings to the object of his desire.

The sheer unpleasantness of the subject matter marks an interesting departure from the haunting romantic ballads that provided a sonic background for montage sequences on the defunct teen soap “The O.C.” and propelled the band to national indie fame.

If one song on “Narrow Stairs” is emblematic of this mood, it’s “I Will Possess Your Heart.” The track opens with almost five minutes of sound before a single lyric is sung. It builds, trancelike, from a simple bass line, incorporating jangly, bended guitar notes; a sharp, almost metallic keyboard part and a steady drumbeat. Mr. Gibbard’s plaintive, threatening lyrics emerge from this hypnotic haze. He sings, “How I wish you could see the potential,/ the potential of you and me. It’s like a book elegantly bound,/ but in a language that you can’t read just yet.”

The operative word here is “yet,” as the singer makes abundantly clear with the line, “You reject my advances and desperate pleas/ I won’t let you, let me down so easily.”

“Cat …” is another pleading song that addresses a reluctant romantic partner. The song opens with a rush of guitar out of a heavy-metal power ballad. The scene is a wedding, where the uneasy bride “holds a smile like someone would hold a crying child.” An engaged woman who receives a mix-CD containing this trackfrom an ex-boyfriend would likely have grounds for a restraining order — with the lyric, “but you said your vows, and you closed the door/on so many men who would have loved you more” providing the necessary evidence.

The organ-driven “You Can Do Better Than Me” doesn’t sound like anything else on this album or in the DCFC catalog. Opening with a Phil Spector-inspired drumbeat and a wall of guitar and organ, Mr. Gibbard croons and occasionally reaches for a falsetto as the Hammond B3 whistles and the heavy drums plod. The pop-fueled sound is at odds with the tune’s pathetic message captured in the lyric, “I have to face the truth that no one could ever look at me like you do/ Like I’m something worth holding on to.”

The overall effect of “Narrow Stairs” is both seductive and creepy. Easy melodies collide with driving, insistent bass lines. Sweetly melancholy vocal lines belie dark, depressive, frequently agonizing and occasionally murderous sentiments. Yet throughout it all, there’s this weirdly comforting overlay of ironic distance that lets the listener know the darkness here is not meant to be taken to heart. On the excellent, 1980s-power-pop-inspired “Long Division,” Mr. Gibbard sings, “His head was a city of paper buildings.”

The emotional landscape of “Narrow Stairs” is similarly evanescent.