Fair to say we have some irreconcilable issues with Gibbard…

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[4.62]

Micha Cavaseno: How have these hacks done it? How is their drummer always playing things that sound nice but are devoid of funk? How has nobody called out Ben Gibbard on his gimmicky ultrafast vibrato, nasal mewlings and train scrawlings by a dude who has a bachelors in English and a lot of opinions but no content? How does their guitarist come up with riffs I’m sure I came up with learning the guitar and make them sound like they’re some of the most difficultly acquired song-parts in ever? This band is still locked in HBO Series Finale Outro sonics, and I’m sick of it.
[4]

Juana Giaimo: Death Cab For Cutie have found a formula and no matter how hard they try to avoid it, they always fall into it again. “Black Sun” isn’t an exception, but it has its bright moments, like when Ben Gibbard changes the serious melody of the chorus for a much warmer, vulnerable one. Instants like these are what makes Death Cab For Cutie worth following, even when they always make me feel that they could be better. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: I can’t get past Ben Gibbard’s voice: that of an emphatic NPR announcer, rapping a knuckle on a podium. I can’t endure the well-behaved feedback and lethargic electric piano either. In short, the band’s tip-toeing through this incoherent number feels like the sort of crime I need to report to The Hague.
[3]

Scott Mildenhall: Ben Gibbard really does have an unavoidably awkward voice. It’s so rounded that it’s almost Weird Al, only lacking the same cartoonishness, instead leaning here towards a seriousness he nonetheless cannot pull off. Even if he could better sell the occasionally poetic contradictions of lyrics, though, they’d fall flat in an arrangement largely even flatter.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: I first came into contact with Ben Gibbard via Postal Service, whose album I will forever and ever love in spite of its eventual ubiquity in American Apparel stores. Accordingly, I’m inclined to like Gibbard-vox’d stuff — except for the fact that his main gig is so goddamn boring. This has a good bit more texture than I’ve heard from DCFC, however; once the fuzzed-out guitar “solo” kicks in, it makes me think of Moby circa “That’s When I Reach For My Revolver” crossed with early-ambient Moby. Which is a positive.
[6]

Luisa Lopez: Given that this album is supposed to be, at least in some sense, a farewell to departing guitarist Chris Walla (and ideally an acknowledgment of the complexities of goodbyes), I expected something a little less noisy, a little more “Passenger Seat”. Goodbyes can be complicated, and often are, but infusing them with crushing guitars and verses whose images sound lovely but hold no weight when measured against the sentiments they’re meant to hold up doesn’t somehow make a departure something it was not or a song something that could have been good. 
[4]

Ian Mathers: Oh god, is this going to be a divorce album?
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: Chris Walla is a talented producer, one who nurtures into being warm and intimate sounds that accord with dramas of domesticity and close studies of knotty relationships — think not just of his work with Death Cab, but also, say, with Tegan and Sara. “Black Sun” is Walla’s old band’s first work since he moved on though, and as if to make up for his impending absence, the group, along with producer Rich Costey, have scrimshawed their new single with sawtooth blurts and iridescent synth formations. Walla plays on the song, so neither his departure nor the band’s sonic one is decisive: after all, the group’s shift from melody-driven song structures to textural ones did not begin here either. Yet it is a shake-up significant enough to make this band sound more interesting than it has in a long while, even if it’s another step down the road to a technical fussiness that, as much as these guys try, cannot be made interesting in and of itself. Death Cab was never punkish and it was suited to the studio even in its lo-fi youth, but Ben Gibbard’s thoughts were most transfixing when clouded with collegiate messiness, and perhaps also when my ears were situated amidst the same. With no new stories to tell, the band is looking instead for new ways to do the telling. That is fine, to a point.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Did a song so committed to being a portent of doom just intone the line “there is a dumpster in the driveway/with all the plans that became undone”? That has to be taking the piss, they can’t be serious with that shit.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: “A desert veiled in pavement… a city of seven hills.” This is not so much a song, more a guy dictating a map to a com-fit artist in the hope someone might recognise it.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: I’d figured mid-2000s indie would forever be a gap in my musical knowledge, but somewhere along the line the minor-key moroseness, the synth squalls, the Kubla Khansense lyrics giving way to unadorned feeling, even the canned drum pattern all got buried in there. Comfort-food rock.
[7]

Brad Shoup: A creeping, melodic opal. I dig late-period Death Cab, with all this divorce imagery and glances at the sunset. Gibbard’s voice is turning husky; he was never one to hold a note, but now they’re slipping from his hands.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: The first album I ever SoulSeeked was Death Cab For Cutie’s Transatlanticism: 30 percent because I liked The Postal Service, 70 percent for being a morose high schooler, to the point that Ben Gibbard’s mumbling about the glove compartment passed as poetry. I could picture “Black Sun” once meaning a lot to me, its muddy trudge passing for gloopy doom, but coming from a 38-year-old, it’s just boring and overdramatic.
[3]