Quiet yearning works great for Death Cab for Cutie's Chris Walla as a producer and a guitarist, but it makes for a pretty bland solo album. If Walla came from any other genre than what used to be called "college rock," he might get the respect he deserves for his production on modest hits by his Washington-based band with Ben Gibbard, as well as Portland, Ore. jangle-poppers the Decemberists. The soft-rock spaciousness Walla brings to those projects is the order of the day on Field Manual, his first solo album. Unfortunately, the same sort of distance spills over into his songwriting. It's not just that Walla sings about being far away, which he does -- echoing a theme from the best Death Cab album, 2003's Transatlanticism -- it's that his complaints are so impersonal. "Everybody needs a place to go," Walla whispers in a wispy voice almost indistinguishable from Death Cab frontman Gibbard's on R.E.M.-style acoustic strummer "Everybody Needs a Home." The catchiest moments are the most upbeat, like bristling "Geometry &c." with its wordless refrain, or the Nirvana-esque crunch of "The Score." Also memorable is "Sing Again," an elegant track that reads as a right-on defense of music that's "not tricky to enjoy." Too often, though, Field Manual is easiest to ignore. Take the dirge-like "It's Unsustainable" or "Holes," or washed-out Elliott Smith laments like "A Bird Is a Song" and "Everybody On." From Walla's earliest production efforts, it was obvious he'd go on to even better things. Field Manual isn't one of them.

-- Marc Hogan