Lively band, lingering lyrics

Death Cab for Cutie's songs exist, first and foremost, so that Ben Gibbard's lyrics can be heard.

That's a good thing. As introspective singer-songwriters go, Gibbard is smarter than most. And his sharply observed, sad-eyed accounts of shipwrecked romances and lost opportunities rarely resolve the messes of real life into too-tidily tied-up three-minute solutions.

"And then it started getting dark, and I trudged back to the car," Gibbard sang on "Bixby Canyon Bridge," from the band's satisfyingly thorny new album

Narrow Stairs

, as night was falling on the Mann Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday. "No closer to any kind of truth, as I assume it was for you."

But in the pop-music arena in which Death Cab is ever-more successful -

Narrow Stairs

, the band's sixth album, topped the charts last month by selling 144,000 copies in its first week - words are not enough.

Death Cab demonstrated how well it understands that truism at the Mann, where the Seattle quartet drew a midweek date-night crowd of indie-rock romantics, mostly college-age and younger. ("I feel old here," one wag was overheard saying on the concourse. "And I'm 25.") From the opening song "Bixby," the band - Gibbard, drummer Jason McGerr, bass player Nicholas Harmer, and multi-instrumentalist Chris Walla - came out swinging, bringing forth its dense, textured soundscape with insistent vigor.

With his mike stand set in the properly indie left-of-center position on stage, Gibbard bounced back and forth on his feet, a bundle of nervous energy. Bass lines bubbled up, and Walla's keyboard bursts shot through a strategically claustrophobic sound mix.

The tension reflected the increasingly limited life options that the 31-year-old Gibbard presents himself with on songs like "No Sunlight," which was part of a four-song encore that also included "The Sound of Settling," about the uneasy transition to carefully examined adulthood, from

Transatlanticism

(2003).

Death Cab gets major points for delivering its sinewy, self-regarding tunes with a vigor that never let up over a bracing 100 minutes. But the biggest crowd-pleasing moment on this night - the rare large-scale Philadelphia rock show where the male minority was more likely to be worried about its summer reading list than to burst into an E-A-G-L-E-S men's-room chant - came during the evening's quietest song.

It was a solo acoustic "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," in which Gibbard sang of staying true to his love even after their souls move on to whatever comes after death. It had hearts aflutter on a lovely summer evening, and as it was delicately sung by the lank-haired Gibbard - freed by contact lenses or Lasik surgery from wearing his trademark specs - he resembled, more than ever, an indie-rock Jackson Browne.