Plans. To John Lennon, they're what people are busy making while life happens to them. To Robbie Burns, even the best-laid ones aft gang aglay. And to Death Cab's Ben Gibbard, they're a tiny glance of Father Time.

Which is to say: Plans often don't turn out the way you expect.

That includes Plans, the fifth album and major-label debut from Death Cab for Cutie. Now that The O.C. has upgraded them from underground cult heroes to pop-culture phenoms, you might expect these Washington indie-rockers to go big and come out swinging for the fences on this 11-song offering. And you'd be so wrong.

The 44-minute Plans is a poignant and subdued platter of low-wattage grooves, sombre melodies, sad waltzes and wistful lyrics. Guitars are turned down, unplugged or even replaced altogether with bleepy keyboards and glitchy beatboxes more reminiscent of Gibbard's surprisingly successful side project The Postal Service.

As a result, nothing here packs the musical punch of Transatlanticism cuts like The New Year or We Looked Like Giants. Don't confuse sensitivity with weakness, though.

Like always, main singer-songwriter Gibbard serves up a bittersweet lyrical cocktail of heartbreak, regret and loss. Oh yeah, and death. Lotsa death. From the suicide-pact devotion of I Will Follow You Into the Dark to the hospital deathbed vigil of What Sarah Said, Plans finds Gibbard confronting mortality like never before.

That is, when he isn't comparing his love to the size of New York on Marching Bands of Manhattan or dishing up the best breakup line we've ever heard in Someday You Will be Loved: "Your heart belongs to someone you've yet to meet ... And the memories of me will seem more like bad dreams."

Between confessional lines like that and the slow-burning beauty of the musical backdrops that go with them, this may be Death Cab's least immediate but most intimate disc -- even if it doesn't always go according to plan.

Track Listing:

1. Marching Bands of Manhattan
2. Soul Meets Body
3. Summer Skin
4. Different Names for the Same Thing
5. I Will Follow You into the Dark
6. Your Heart Is an Empty Room
7. Someday You Will Be Loved
8. Crooked Teeth
9. What Sarah Said
10. Brothers on a Hotel Bus
11. Stable Song