Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard is the poet of a particular purgatory — the holding cell in your head that's filled with failed relationships and wrong roads taken. Death Cab's most memorable songs contain snapshots from its walls: Gibbard has sung about an incriminating kiss in a photo booth, discovering forgotten pictures of an ex in his glove compartment, and an especially bleak Kodak moment from a doomed marriage. On "Cath . . . ," from the band's new Narrow Stairs, he finds a girl "in a hand-me-down wedding dress," and the details feel like knife twists: "As the flashbulbs burst, she holds a smile/Like someone would hold a crying child."

That sort of heartbreak defines Narrow Stairs. But where Death Cab's past records made it easy to empathize with Gibbard's narrators, the group's second major-label release zeros in on characters who are often more creepy than cuddly. The result is a dark, strangely compelling record that trades the group's bright melancholy for something nearer to despair.