Elsinore’s new website is cuter than a Threadless tee. Browse through the various pages to catch a glimpse of all the different designs!

Death Cab For Cutie’s new single, “I Will Possess Your Heart” doesn’t have any lyrics for the first minute….and a half….two minutes…two and a half minutes…THREE minutes…three and a half minutes…no way, four minutes…4:35, lyrics.

Four minutes and thirty-five seconds. One would have sufficed. Granted, Gibbard’s voice sounds impeccably…clear, for some reason when he finally chimes in. The sound quality is fantastic, something that must have either been missing on previous records or been overshadowed by sad lyrics and sad instrumentals and the sounds of people across the world crying their eyes out or putting on guyliner to Death Cab’s music.

Slightly repetetive (both instrumentally and lyrically, considering they gave me Ben Gibbard blue balls for almost five minutes) and a clear step in a different direction from their other material, I hope the album is a mix of their old and new sounds, and not something that’s unrelated to their previous work. After all, no one wants to watch the clock and countdown the minutes to their new album’s failure.

Check out the long song on their MySpace page.

[I’m going to make this a recurring feature with different CDs each time. Let me know if you hate it in the comments section.]

When I first glanced at the disc, I was totally turned off. Besides it having a Rihanna song which I thought was “Don’t Stop The Music” (which I truly enjoy) but was actually the lesser “Shut Up And Drive” and appearances by MGMT and LCD Soundsystem, there was one song in particular that ruined all fifteen tracks. It was dated, post-trendy and hopelessly out of touch of the film’s music staff to include it. What was this one tune that ruined them all?

“Young Folks” by Peter, Bjorn and John.

Yes, the super-hyped track of 2007’s yesteryear resides smack dab in the middle of the soundtrack for a movie released in the spring of ‘08. And while I was dreading its inevitability during my first spin of the album, it wasn’t so bad when its memorable drum beats started. In fact, it was a nice listen, similar to all of that ’90s music that we still love only because we loved it way back when too.

Overall, the album is extremely coherent, with the highly-produced electronics and slow, almost sluggish vocals transferring over between tracks. A lot of the songs have James Bond beats, which could easily accompany what I predict to be a tense walk through hotel hallways, car chases around Vegas, escaping the casino officials who are out to get them, winning millions with a slow motion pan of money being thrown up and slowly falling to the ground around them…hmm. I haven’t seen the flick, but I’m guessing the soundtrack works well, and that PB&J track might just fit after all.

But, really, I wasn’t lying earlier — I love that Rihanna joint.

Choice Tracks: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by The Rolling Stones, re-mixed and re-edited by Soulwax; “Sister Self Doubt” by Get Shakes

Get: the disc and track list info at Amazon.com or ogle Kate Bosworth’s skeletal frame at the movie’s website.