After a series of well received albums, Plans marks Death Cab for Cutie’s first on a major label. The album is an impressive collaboration between Death Cab, Atlantic Records, and former indie label Barsuk Records, home of fellow rockers Nada Surf, They Might Be Giants, and the Long Winters.

In the past, the band’s style has been a rather delicate and pensive pop which occasionally sweeps into realms of the profound. Plans, however, is a beautifully crafted and preformed record which adds up to even more than the sum of its stunningly well conceived parts.

Plans’s atmospheric harmonies pay respect to band’s rainy Bellingham roots but in many ways the album goes above and beyond any previous works.

Thematically, the record proves a mature, almost cynical, artistic thesis. The record was the band’s first to be recorded on the East Coast, and I think that gives it a kind of new savvy not seen on the band’s last record Transatlanticism. This musical or cultural awareness is especially noticeable on the first track "Marching Bands of Manhattan."

The wary harmonies and tenuous melodies of the first few songs give way to a sure-footed tone of experience or perhaps resignation in tracks after and including "I Will Follow You into the Dark."

Later, the bouncy tune "Crooked Teeth" is redolent of their earlier works and, some critics charge, a bit immature for this otherwise very gown-up effort.

My favorite track was not composed by Benjamin Gibbered, the band’s front man, and until now, only composer. Chris Walla, producer and guitarist, in said to have done the majority of the creative work on "Brothers on a Hotel Bed," a song that almost languishes in its piano intro before breaking into a balance of thoughtfully nostalgic lyrics and uncharacteristically bare instrumentation.