In truth, the fate of Death Cab for Cutie was sealed the second Seth Cohen swore to their transcendence on The O.C. Over the course of the next several months, the Washington quintet went from a curious cult act with a funny name to a band with enough hip cachet to convince 400,000 people that their records are worth buying.

What's happened to Death Cab is in some ways emblematic of a larger issue: indie rock's gradual codification. As the music has gone from the provenance of young misfits to an endcap display at Target, there's been a fundamental shift in the qualities that define its most beloved bands, away from the ramshackle and often alienating squall of groups like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. toward calmer and more conventional tropes.

Not that music needs to be confrontational to be effective; the trouble is that while indie rock has gradually sanded its edges to meet the doughy middle, it's still retained its most irksome quality: its aura of enlightenment and superiority. It's no coincidence that the characters who are constantly speaking the praises of bands like Death Cab are charming dorks like Cohen's character or kooky shamans like Natalie Portman in Garden State. There remains a persistent and dangerous conflation of indie rock and intellectualism, and if you don't believe me, think of how ridiculous it would seem if Matt LeBlanc burned 15 minutes of every Joey episode carrying on about Sufjan Stevens.

This presumed prepotency creeps into the way the bands are discussed. The Shins aren't simply a good pop band — they will "change your life." The upshot of this is that it freights the artists in question with an undue amount of import. Because bands like Death Cab are so beloved by such agonizingly in-touch characters, it's implicit by proxy that they are somehow smarter and deeper and realer than mainstream pop artists, and that fact alone is enough to warrant attention.

Well, they aren't and it's not. Which brings us to Plans, a middling record from a just-fine rock band that doesn't swerve far enough left to be daring or right enough to be pop. Unlike 2003's Transatlanticism, which at least alternated ethereal ballads with restless up-tempo plaints, Plans seems perpetually lodged in cruise. The songs are tenderly swaddled in layers of lacy guitar, Ben Gibbard's yearning tenor gliding breezily along their upper reaches. Death Cab songs have a tendency to repeat a single musical phrase over and over, gradually building intensity and adding tiny embellishments with each go-round. While it's clear that considerable focus went into making each of Plans' tiny musical gears whir and click, none of that meticulous diagramming managed to produce anything especially memorable.

Gibbard's got a kind of everyman vulnerability, and but for a few million extra dollars in promotion, he could be the one squiring Gwyneth Paltrow to Fair Trade benefit concerts. Coldplay isn't such a bad jumping-off point — both bands craft shimmering rococo pop designed to evoke the maximum emotional response. Unfortunately, both bands also share a proclivity for sanctimoniousness. Nowhere is this more apparent — or more noxious — than in "Someday You Will Be Loved," where Gibbard piously assures the object of a one-night stand that, although he's slipping out the back door, one day someone will come along who will treat her right. The song was probably intended as an effort to whisk away some of Gibbard's sweetie-pie aura, but because he has played that part for so long now, his lame consolation instead comes off genuine — which has the ironic effect of making him seem like a self-involved asshole. And while Gibbard is never as loathsomely self-satisfied as, say, Conor Oberst, the band's persistently programmatic execution forces a kind of gravitas on his verse that it can't always support.

It's not Death Cab's fault that they've become the apotheosis of nerd chic, but at the same time you can't help but wish they'd tried a little harder to make a record that was at least sporadically engaging. It's puzzling that such wan, limpid soft-rock could inspire such ardor. For all its affect and labored sensitivity, the fact is that there's nothing here that's as effortlessly enervating as the best moments on the new Mariah Carey record. As Plans goes, so goes the new indie rock: warm, bright, lofty and passive as the Orange County sun. The big revelations have come and gone. This is the sound of settling.