It could easily be argued that the Decemberists get away with a cluster of sins that most bands couldn’t commit one at a time and receive exoneration. The prog-folk sound they build bigger and breathier with each new effort could barely be carried out by ELO, the Incredible String Band and Jethro Tull during the anything-goes slumber of the seventies. Their hyper-literate lyricism always contains at least two or three words on each album that sends me in search of a dictionary. No matter how linear their storytelling is (and just as often it’s not), the point of view and speaker is rarely predictable—as told by killers, ghouls, babies and other unreliable narrators. And they flaunt their indie preciousness and musical worldliness both through their catalog of charming songs and their actions off-stage—a potential prize for pre-ordering their latest album is a Baglama Saz that’s been “festooned with signatures” from the band. If you don’t know (and I didn’t), a Baglama Saz is a Turkish three-string banjo-like instrument. Suddenly, the mandolin sounds as generically workmanlike as a bass guitar.
So how does the Decemberists manage to dodge not just one bloated practice but every single one of them at the same time? How have they emerged as one of the most fascinating and brilliantly realized outfits of the decade? How have they discovered a way to safely fly closer to the sun with Icarus wings on each successive release and yet get bolder, brighter and better every time? There’s no clinical or scientific rhyme to the reason; it can be explained no easier than the mirage of life and the finality of death. But they manage to enthrall instead of exacerbate, and no matter the crime committed upon sensibilities of folk rock music, they remain outlaws of daring and heroic nobility.
There is one exception to the rule, though. The Hazards of Love does not earn the “best album yet” stamp that their other full-lengths garnered. As a follow-up to The Crane Wife, even I wasn’t expecting it to best the predecessor. And I certainly wasn’t expecting an album even trickier and more grandiose than what came before. After finishing that last magnum opus, the group planned on focusing their craft on something more direct, discreet, relaxed and simple. The Beatles promised the same thing after Sgt. Pepper. But just as the elephantine curveball to the vow, The White Album, came next for the Fab Four, so too is Hazards of Love even more ambitious and bombastic than their last. And since at first glance it seems to be an aspiration to trump perfection, doom overwhelms. When mediocrity strains for middle-ground results, you get what you expect. But when someone strives for mastery and fails, it can sink careers.
Luckily, Hazards is no failure, though it dangerously flirts with it from time to time. Some passages are more successful than others, mostly in terms of momentum that picks up and ebbs away at several junctures. Normally, these problematic instances can be handled by the conspiracy of the buyer; thanks to modern technology, anyone can reorder an album’s tracks to fit their mood, or simply delete a couple of filler tracks/losers along the way. But The Hazards of Love would be Kryptonite to the stereotypical ADD music fan of today. Instead of being able to snatch a few choice moments off for that day’s iPod mix, Hazards demands start-to-finish listening, and not of the casual background music variety. In a recent debate I had, it was speculated that digital music technology is severely hurting the album concept. This record aims to deflate that fear.
Telling a fantastical tale of lovers, witches, villains, shapeshifters and ghosts, this is actually pretty familiar territory for the Decemberists. And the band wastes little time running the gamut of genre-bending exercises before hitting their stride. We drift through folk rock and melodic chamber pop during the early sequence before getting an earful of muscular power chords that bite and thrash at both climaxes of the menacing “A Bower Scene” (that a two-minute song could actually have two climaxes is no easy feat). Then that song moves directly into a dark country-blues riff for “Won’t Want for Love,” but the refrain glides across dreamy piano pop: “And all this stirring inside my belly/Won't quell my want for love/And I may swoon from all this swaying/But I won't want for love”—the transitions remain reflexive but startlingly smooth. Then it moves towards a reprise of the four-part title track, which all have similar skeletons but never sound the same each time they arise.
Around this time is where the momentum begins to drag a bit. “Isn’t It A Lovely Night” is actually a pretty lovely tune, but its languorous tempo makes it feel a little long after the frantic hard rock edge of “Bower” and “Love” and the mellifluous melody of “The Hazards of Love 2.” Luckily, “The Wanting Comes in Waves” starts slow but intriguing with a percussive line that sounds like a child’s harpsichord but quickly picks up in speed after the first minute and throws in soaring guitars and ethereal ooh-ooh back-ups, and then dissolves into more brawny swagger. My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden plays the queen and tells us, “He was a baby abandoned, entombed in a cradle of clay, and I was a soul who took pity and stole him away and gave him the form of a faun to inhabit.” Chris Funk’s guitar is as belligerent as Queen and Iron Maiden at their heaviest in the 70s, John Moen’s drums rattle and crack like Bonham artillery fire and Worden’s guest vocals are of the Ann Wilson/Joan Jett variety—hard rock fans of that era should lap this one up.
After a soft but atmospheric interlude track (conveniently called “An Interlude”), we press onward to “The Rake’s Song,” a terrific and terrifying conflagration of Colin Meloy’s ghastly acoustic pounce, fuzzy basement-hell distortion and more slambang drum crashes. The tale of the rake is truly monstrous, as he describes murdering the children he had no use for: “Charlotte I buried after feeding her foxglove/Dawn was easy, she was drowned in the bath/Eziah fought but was easily bested/Burned his body for incurring my wrath.” After that, the “Bower Song” progression is reprised on “The Abduction of Margaret” and the heavy metal roars back in on “The Queen’s Rebuke.” Funk might as well throw another guitar challenge at Stephen Colbert with his fiery prowess on this one; Jenny Conlee’s organ even blazes a series answering calls.
The pace slows again during the next stage with “Annan Water” and “Margaret in Captivity,” but only because what preceded it is as loud and destructive as the Decemberists have ever been. And just when the band seems to have pushed the boundaries too far by introducing a children’s choir on the third act of the title song, the lyrics reflect grim justice that serves the unsettling quality well (it’s even subtitled, “Revenge!”). Laid over Nate Query’s spooky, creaking strings are some skin-crawling tones of dead children returning from the grave, the ones killed by the wretched rake of a father several songs back. Eziah's spectre haunts with, “My sisters drowned and poisoned/All of me reduced to ash/And buried in an urn/But father I return.” And then we finish with the subdued tragic reaches of the fourth “Hazards of Love” as poor Margaret and her lover sink to the bottom of the sea; “With this long last rush of air we speak out vows and sorry whispers/When the waves came crashing down, he closed his eyes and softly kissed her.”
Unlike The Crane Wife, The Hazards of Love doesn’t announce its greatness on that first listen. The cliché is to call it a “grower,” which is indeed true. Its only noteworthy failing answers its greatest strength—as a concept album (bordering on “folk opera”), it lacks the great individual songs to take away and cherish. Even the best ones rarely sound half as good out of context of the rest of the album. Saying this is a fault doesn’t sit easily, I know, but this is a band that’s never failed to deliver a quality track when they tried, and precious few are wonderful enough to inspire cheating the story’s progression and replaying them again and again (though another dozen listens may change my mind). On The Crane Wife, it was as good all the way through as it is when you just want to pick one or two for a quick fix (which happened to be any and every one of ‘em).
The band’s storytelling remains as grandiloquent as ever before, and sacrifices dot-connecting for a largesse of vivid and poetic imagery. It’s not always easy to follow what’s happening (certainly not the first time and not even after multiple passes) and the specifics could be debated. But the Decemberists were always better at mood, whimsy, bleak bloodshed and dark grins than concrete matters. As a narrative, the music fits what’s needed (and goes above and beyond the requirements), but there’s something oddly anti-climactic with the way it ends. As quiet, lamentable tragedy demands soft and sorrowful music to accompany it, it still sounds like a sigh after the thunder that led to that moment. But changing it would probably sound worse, so in the context of what the Decemberists were aiming to do, it works just fine.
Minor quibbles aside, the adventurous spirit of this band doesn’t always guarantee spectacular results, but their attention and ear for a good melody does. Musically, they hardly even sound like the same band that gave us Castaways and Cutouts a mere seven years and four albums ago. But as they continue to push the limits of pomposity to prove that nothing can defeat a good tune, they are playing as tight as ever before. Each band member's piece to the puzzle fits perfectly, the guests serve an important purpose and never feel overbearing (I had trouble figuring out where Jim James and Robyn Hitchcock were even at on the first couple listens) and Tucker Martine’s production continues to expand the layers far past what initially seemed to be the breaking point. I used to think there was a ceiling for this sort of thematic, lyrical and musical ambition, but I’m beginning to wonder if I was completely wrong. Right now, after five truly great albums and likely more ahead, the sky’s the limits for the Decemberists.
