Death Cab fuses melancholy art and rock band noise

Ben Gibbard performs one of Death Cab for Cutie's dark but epic tunes at Agganis Arena. (Evan Richman/ Globe Staff)

Not many bands could get away with choosing "I Will Possess Your Heart," an eight-and-a-half minute song, as their first single to promote a new album. But then, most bands aren't Death Cab for Cutie, a Bellingham, Wash., outfit that, since starting 10 years ago, has made a point of doing things its own way, and connecting with a lot of listeners in the process.

As the onetime torchbearers for a style of rawly confessional, self-probing/self-absorbed indie rock termed, most unfortunately, "emo," Death Cab has exploded such self-conscious niche markets and graduated from playing stuffy basement stages to well-lighted pleasure domes. They now record for a major label (although that hasn't stopped them from sounding like nobody but themselves) and on Friday night drew 5,000 people to Agganis Arena, where the band's public distillations of private dilemmas could be put on full, occasionally majestic display.

Death Cab for Cutie's sixth and latest album is titled "Narrow Stairs," but for nearly two hours the quartet's invigorating, epic expositions on profound regret and autumnal longing felt anything but small or confining. The structure of their stairway - in the form of songs like "The Sound of Settling," "Long Division," and "Grapevine Fires" - did, however, descend into the darkness far more often than it ascended into daylight. "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," a ballad of striking poignancy that was both at the physical center and emotional heart of Death Cab's 20-song set, led in both directions.

The evening's opener, "Bixby Canyon Bridge," found singer-guitarist Ben Gibbard visiting a creek where, apparently, a loved one's soul had died. He waited for a voice to speak to him from beneath the water or beyond the trees, and it didn't, of course. Instead, there was no comfort; just the storyteller engulfed by the silence around him, and a sense of bewilderment and disappointment with his failed pilgrimage. The fact that this mood of brooding quietude was accomplished so completely, so beautifully, despite guitarist Chris Walla and the rest of the band kicking up around Gibbard, was a testament to Death Cab's ability to wring melancholic art from rock band noise.

With its outsize drama, epochal guitar chords, and rippling drums, "The New Year" hinted at a better outcome. The bright coloring and bold electricity of its introduction seemed to foreshadow an improvement in the singer's state of affairs - an encouraging epiphany perhaps. Until we heard Gibbard announce the opening lines in his keening, helpless tenor: "So this is the new year and I don't feel any different."

Ultimately, there were no resolutions or solutions, just a desire to connect and collapse distances, and firecrackers on front lawns in place of hope.