When the confused onlookers are left scratching their heads as to how the upcoming Narrow Stairs has been greeted with such fervent anticipation from the bloggers, indie-kids and mainstream listeners alike, the answer is, simply enough, because Death Cab for Cutie put out such an unpretentious form of pop music. Delicate and endearing at their best, the Seattle group never comes across as a band trying to make a buck; an odd sentiment for an independent band leaping to the majors.

The back story has its place in any review. Death Cab peaked at a dumbfounding number 4 with their Atlantic debut, Plans, and despite the slick, faux-spirituality of that album's single "Soul Meets Body," did very little to alienate their long-time fans (going so far as to encourage illegal downloads, saying "The more anarchy we can give to the record industry, the better" in a PopMatters interview). But after almost three years since the band became Big Deals the question on most fans' minds is if the new record is any good. More complicated; which Death Cab do we get this time around - the poppy, polished band that put out the mainstream single "Soul Meets Body," or the precious, sensitive band that made their humble name with mini-classics like "Champagne from a Paper Cup"?

The answer is both… sort of. The band takes some calculated risks with Narrow Stairs; the first single, for example, is an 8-minute stalker-jam called "I Will Possess Your Heart" (think the Police's "Every Breath You Take" as played by a post-rock version of Iron Butterfly). Immediately following that is an electronic-inflected song called "No Sunlight" that sounds like a boring, middle-aged Postal Service. It's a risk, a change in sound, but one that bears no true fruit.

And that's the constant struggle of Narrow Stairs: either Gibbard and company knock it out of the park - as with the gorgeous shoe-gazer ballad "Talking Bird," with its destructively fuzzy guitar part carefully honed into something soft and striking, clean-picked guitars adding structure, building the song from a fuzzy mess into an almost soft, heart-felt ballad - or they don't. "Talking Bird" is trailed by the awkwardly bare "You Could Do Better Than Me," a track with a middle-aged rock tempo that makes its lyrics a focal point, to the point of distraction. Gibbard's deeply personal, detailed lyrics, as often beautiful as they are cringe-worthy, continue to be a double-edged sword.

So goes the rest of Narrow Stairs; the band doesn't make any swipes for a repeat of the "Soul Meets Body"-esque polished pop (one would assume that climbing the pop charts isn't a priority), but they also fail to convincingly steer the ship in any one direction. For every legacy-affirming moment (the guitar outro of "Your New Twin Sized Bed" for instance) they blow it with a clunker (like the closer "The Ice is Getting Thinner"). Rather than sorting through their multiple personalities, the true question is what happened to the cohesiveness the band showed on the albums that earned them an adoring fanbase and prompted the ensuing major label crushes? As the band's focus, Ben Gibbard has shown growth which each successive release, and made the jump to hooky pop-songsmith with the Postal Service's (apparently) one-off collaboration, but Narrow Stairs feels stagnant, devoid of even the superficial pleasures present on Plans.