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And the summer of death circus tour rolls on.

Only this time the only thing dying is my infatuation with Zooey Deschanel now that she is officially married to Death Cab’s Ben Gibbard. 

Chris Walla sorta gave it away on Twitter yesterday.

A poignant new fan-made video for Death Cab for Cutie’s “Grapevine Fires,” a song about the 2007 California fires is simply stunning.  The animated reel was created by Death Cab fans at Walter Robot Studios, otherwise known as multimedia artist Bill Barminski and writer Christopher Louie. The duo has also made compelling clips for Modest Mouse and Gnarls Barkley, but its love for Ben Gibbard and Co. was reciprocated.

“I have been an admirer of the beautiful art of Walter Robot from afar for a while,” confessed Death Cab for Cutie bassist Nick Harmer in a press release about the video, which premiered Monday. “Working with them on this video is an amazing dream come true and I am in awe of the stunning video they have made for us.”

This is one of the better videos I’ve seen in quite sometime.  The melding of visuals and music is so spot on, it makes you remember why music videos could be so powerful in the first place.

Death Cab For Cutie’s record label is Atlantic, which is a subsidiary of Warner Music Group.  When you go to the DCFC website you can’t watch any of the band’s videos.  This is failure and irony on several levels.

It makes sense for the band to host you’re videos on YouTube or Vimeo or some other such third-party video hosting site. After all, the exposure from these sites allows the band to put their music in many more ears than it would otherwise.  It doesn’t make sense for the band or the company behind the website to host their own videos when they can rely on the bandwidth of YouTube.

However, the downside to not hosting you’re own music videos, etc. is that when your record label, in this case WMG, makes a copyright infringement claim to YouTube then poof, all of DCFC’s videos are removed.  Unfortunately, no one caught this on the band’s website.  And the band ends up looking foolish (since you can’t watch videos that are supposed to be there) and the record label ends up looking doltish (which is just a kind way of saying they look like flippin’ idiots).

This is stupid for both the band and the record label on some many levels, but mostly I find it funny that a record label that is trying to profit off the music by Death Cab For Cutie is actually hindering that.  It’s like the snake that eats its tail.

I imagine this comes from a boardroom where the old executives and dumb lawyers don’t have the faintest idea how new technologies work or could improve profits.  It would be shameful if it weren’t so funny.  [via reddit]

James Lipton doing his thing.  There’s a moment here, where even Lipton is caught off guard by the teleprompters.  It’s pretty funny.  But what’s really funny is Ben Gibbard’s ematiated torso.

It’s hard to believe that at one point people actually referred to the Death Cab for Cutie frontman as “schlubby.”  He better start eating some carbs or get off the coke diet pretty soon, otherwise he’s going to need rocks in his pockets to keep from blowing away this winter.

So Death Cab For Cutie has a new album coming out soon, titled Narrow Stairs.  And already the marketing push is going full force.  MTV stopped by the studio for a listen and you’ve got to wonder if the writer was paid off by the band.  I’m not necessary questioning James Montgomery’s integrity as a music writer, however, he gets a bit gushy (and only after qualifying for us that he never much cared for the band to begin with…)

In short, it’s the album on which Death Cab make the leap, graduating from one of indie’s premiere acts to one of the best bands in the country, a formidable and fearless outfit existing at the exact intersection of critical acclaim and commercial success. This kind of thing only happens when bands stop trying to be all things to all people, shut themselves off from the outside world, and simply play. If they’re good enough — and clearly, Death Cab are — then greatness follows. It’s what happened to Radiohead on OK Computer, or Beck on Odelay or even the White Stripes on Elephant. And now you can add Death Cab for Cutie to the conversation, and whether Narrow Stairs has the same cultural impact as any of those other albums remains to be seen — I’m not even sure any of their fans are gonna buy it — but suffice it to say, it deserves to be heard by as many people as possible.

Narrow Stairs is a great album, one that could make them very famous, but could very well also kill their careers. And you get the feeling they know that, but they don’t really care. After all, there’s no other way to really explain an album like this. They put it all on the line, which is something that I wish more bands would do these days. Whether they crash and burn is sort of up to you now, isn’t it?

We’ll just wait to the album is released.  But that early look at the making of the record was pretty dope, though not sure if you could compare it to Ok Computer, Odelay or even Elephant.  Just saying.

Here’s Ben Gibbard playing “The Ice is Getting Thinner” at Somerville Theater 5/7/07.  This will be one of the tracks on the new album.

I’m not the hugest Death Cab For Cutie fan, but I do appreciate some of their music, especially when they muscle up on the odd occassion.  They’ve got a new album coming out in May.  This will be their second go round on Atlantic Records.  Their first major label debut, Plans was an album with a few gold nuggets.  It didn’t hit on all cylinders, and some diehards of the band will say it didn’t measure up to past albums.  Still, we’re intrigued enough to be casually following developments of their new album.

The band has posted a in studio teaser, which gets us a bit more excited.  The bass line is killer and the last line makes us wonder just what kind of album the guys are gonna give us.