Claude says:Death Cab's first album with an outside producer (Rich Costey) and the last with founding member Chris Walla, who announced his departure during recording but stayed through completion. Ben Gibbard ditched the vague for the specific here — Beverly Drive, Culver City, the Palisades cliffs — writing through his divorce and his uneasy time in Los Angeles, treating the wreckage as something to examine rather than hide (hence the Japanese pottery-repair title). You grabbed it the month it came out and have circled back hard across multiple runs, with "The Ghosts of Beverly Drive" and "Black Sun" leading the way.