This decade's most heralded Seattle band Death Cab For Cutie have built their following on two foundations: There's singer/songwriter Ben Gibbard, with his fragile, boyish tenor and his tales of dishevled love and nostalgiac longing. Then there's the rest of the band, with Chris Walla providing clashing guitar nirvana with bass and guitar shading in the lines.

On their fifth album and first major label release "Plans," Gibbard tried to get expansive, using his piano to plant the melodic seed that redwood-sized arrangements grew out of. It wasn't Death Cab at their most powerful, but it was the group at its most precise and downright pretty.

"Narrow Stairs" finds the band shrinking its sound down to its main components while tampering with structure and genre-dabbling, making a love-it-or-hate-it stand of independence that results in spurts of brilliance and mediocrity.

Things start to sound as usual in the first echoey notes and Gibbard's upper range on the opening track "Bixby Canyon Bridge," but then the jangles abruptly cease for a simplistic guitar/bass/drum/vocal arrangement that is surprisingly sparse at first and slowly expands. Their single "I Will Possess Your Heart" is almost an act of defiance in itself, with its four-minute early-U2-meets-jam-band intro, Gibbard's ominous stalker lyrics and guitars and piano that float, bleed together, collide and disipate only to reappear over a steadfast trebley bassline. It's a song that once again has the four-guys-in-a-room focus but sticks with you.

Death Cab delves into blatant '60s pop experimentation on "You Can Do Better Than Me," where sleighbells, timpani and organ teeter back-and-forth while Gibbard delivers a message on maintaining an expired relationship in lonely resignation. "No Sunlight" is full of peppy uptempo sounds of summer grooves with a hint of Replacements edge. And who would have thought the band would have whipped out the Indian percussion and synchronized vocal/guitar attack on the slow building and surprisingly good "Pity and Fear."

The group is at their peak powers on "Grapevine Fires," with its electic piano, gorgeous melody and sweet harmonies that shows off Gibbard's ability to paint lyrical masterpieces. Plus, on "Your New Twin Sized Bed," Gibbard takes an obvious metaphor of single-status and puts it over a melody of mid-tempo guitar melody so graceful, it makes it forgiveable.

What's not so forgiveable is "Cath...," with a guitar riff straight out of a Third Eye Blind album and the slow but forgettable "Talking Bird." But "Narrow Stairs" isn't a masterpiece as much Death Cab declaring their ability to surprise. "Transatlanticism" it is not, but it does put them in the "what will they do next" category, which isn't a bad place for a band to be.p>