Album: "Plans" by Death Cab for Cutie; Atlantic Records

Released: Aug. 30

Style: Indie pop

The biggest fans of Fox's hit series "The OC" may not, in all honesty, be the teens who watch the show. Arguably, the show's biggest supporters might just be the indie acts that have found themselves on modern-rock radio as a result of being featured on the show.

The show's biggest beneficiary likely is Death Cab for Cutie, which went from being a small-time Seattle band languishing in relative obscurity to releasing its albums on major label Atlantic Records and playing on late-night talk shows and in sold-out arenas worldwide.

Death Cab released its "Plans" to throngs of adoring fans ready to hear Ben Gibbard reflect on lost loves and relationships gone awry. Surely they were excited for the opener "Marching Bands of Manhattan," but they must have been a bit disappointed to find that the next song (and the album's first single) "Soul Meets Body" has almost the same feel. And fans must have been downright disappointed (though they'd never admit it) to hear that the third song, "Summer Skin," sounds like a carbon-copy of the two songs that preceded it.

Nothing on "Plans" really departs from the band's previous work. All of the songs are mid-tempo, restrained numbers — which is fine but gets a bit stale. It's understandable that a band wouldn't want to mess with a successful formula, but at a certain point it's hard to listen to the same thing over and over.

Thankfully, "Different Names for the Same Thing" offers a bit of variety and has a very interesting synthesizer-driven outro, probably thanks to Gibbard's membership in the popular electro-pop outfit The Postal Service. "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" has a nice, stripped-down acoustic feel, akin to Iron and Wine.

Then it's more of the same from Gibbard & Co. until the album's true highlight, "Brothers on a Hotel Bed," which might be among the band's best work ever. It easily brings to mind a drive through the Northeast during the fall, just as the setting sun gets caught among the autumn leaves. The song has a very nice flow and feels a lot shorter than its 4 1/2 minutes (which is always a good thing). Like autumn, though, its beauty is quickly over and again the listener is plunked back into another indiscernible Death Cab track that sounds like most of the band's other songs.

"Plans" isn't a bad album, but it isn't great either. The willingness of Death Cab to push the boundaries as it did, to a small extent, in its early days is gone. Perhaps this is the band putting out a safe album on its major label debut: It has to move a certain number of units, and failing to do so could mean trouble.

It is unfortunate, however, that a band that was starting to hit its stride — with 2003's "Transatlanticism" — decided to play it safe and put out an album that essentially has only three or four songs on it. Death Cab needs to stop being so plaintive for a while and find its sense of adventure again, like it did on "A Movie Script Ending," "We Laugh Indoors" and "A Lack of Color." "Plans" is lackluster at worst and nondescript at best.

Joshua Masayoshi Huff, a graduate of Moanalua High School, attends George Washington University in Washington, D.C.