Live review: Death Cab for Cutie, Tuesday night at the Midland

Hard truth: Death Cab For Cutie has now been a band for over two decades.

In that time, the Seattle act has pushed the boundaries of indie rock and emo while selling millions of albums and earning multiple Grammy nods. Death Cab’s latest, Thank You For Today, was released in August. It’s just as pretty and pleasant as much of the band’s previous material, though you also get the sense that Death Cab has perhaps activated its autopilot mechanism. But that didn’t matter much on Tuesday night at the Midland. Frontman Ben Gibbard and company burned through dazzling renditions of old favorites and brought along a colorful light show to match.

Critics have pointed out the lackluster lyricism that has marked Gibbard’s recent compositions, and the first handful of new-ish songs Death Cab performed seemed to validate that perspective: not much in the way of sing-alongs. But the tasteful rhythms the band conjured up, along with Gibbard’s incessant grooving about the stage, were enough to tide the crowd over until the hits arrived. When the rigid, plucked guitar opening of “Title and Registration” rang out, it sent a wave of smiles through the room and thousands of hands straight into the air.

The band briefly reminisced about its days playing down the road at Lawrence’s Bottleneck in the early ‘00s before “Title Track” — a song from that era that has received little-to-no play on recent Death Cab tour dates. Gibbard’s voice has changed since those days — it’s stronger — but so has society, and though it was one of the evening’s highlights, “I Will Possess Your Heart,” was a reminder that Gibbard’s songwriting had a tendency to veer into now-universally-recognized emo tropes of self-pity and male entitlement. Still, it was a thrill to witness the song’s powerful and brooding opening jam, which highlighted the more mature turn Death Cab’s instrumentation has taken since 2008’s Narrow Stairs. The band’s take on “Black Sun,” a single from 2015’s Kintsugi, exhibited that same sleek, driving post-punk energy and was one of the most memorable songs of the night.

Death Cab’s 80-minute set was capped off with a four-song encore that included Gibbard’s acoustic tearjerker “I Will Follow You Into The Dark” (which evoked the show’s most massive sing-along) and a brilliant performance of the long-distance love song “Transatlanticism.” Somber piano chords echoed throughout the theater as the band slowly built toward its emotional, post-rock crescendo. After eight minutes, the swell of noise and strobes abruptly ceased, ending the show.

Brooklyn quartet Charly Bliss opened things up with a half-hour set of highly polished and stomachache-sweet power-pop.