by Daniel Erenberg

We all knew that The Decemberists would eventually write a concept album. After all, they’ve always been storytellers just as much as they’ve been songwriters, sometimes to an extremely frustrating degree. Their last record, and major label debut, The Crane Wife, came very close to being classified as such, by packing in the three-part title track, as well as the five-section prog-rock epic, “The Island,” but, essentially, it was a song album, with a couple of experiments thrown in. Their new album, The Hazards Of Love, takes this experimentation to the next logical place.

Head Decemberist Colin Meloy had set out after The Crane Wife to put on a stage musical, but instead ends up with this mystifying collection of 17 tracks, which often seems just as interested in the tale it’s trying to weave as in writing memorable indie rock songs, something which The Decemberists often excel at. This is a problem, as the story of The Hazards Of Love is quite silly and lame, and packed to the brim with boring sketches of characters, often performed by Meloy himself, always with the same annoyingly dripping earnestness. Meloy’s main character, William, is a whining little wussy, and often a chore to listen to. He has been raised by the Queen (performed with powerhouse vocals by My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden), and he falls in love with the beautiful Margaret (voiced by Becky Stark, from Lavendar Diamond). It’s a problem that it takes until the eighth track on the album to really buy that they’re into each other. I don’t care how many times Meloy repeats lines like “Oh, my own true love.” It takes the lovely vocal harmonies and emotional wailing of “The Wanting Comes In Waves” for this to finally come across. Of course, Margaret is kidnapped two tracks later by the piece’s villain, The Rake, who really pulls the whole thing into focus.

Historically, the Decemberists have had an extreme lack of balls in their music, so it is clear that Colin Meloy is channeling himself when writing William’s dialogue. Particularly painful is the sequence in “Anaan Water,” when William is trying to get Margaret back from The Rake. “The horses shiver and bite against the bridle,” he sings. “But I will cross if mine own horse is pulled from me/ Though my mother cries that if I try, I sure will drowned be.” This is just flowery, purple prose, attached to some admittedly quite beautiful music. But, when Meloy writes for The Rake, it’s quite different. First of all, he acts while he sings, so he actually sounds threatening for once. He details a story of a married man, who is shocked to see his life ruined when he and his wife begin to have children (“Her womb started spilling out babies!”). The wife dies giving birth to the fourth child, and The Rake, seeking a sense of peace, murders his remaining children. The song ends with a bad-ass bit of foreshadowing: “I expect that you think that I should be haunted/ But it never really bothers me.” The song is punctuated with the entire band screaming a chorus of “All right!” intermittently. It sounds like something Nick Cave would write. It’s Colin Meloy’s version of “Stagger Lee,” and it’s easily the best thing on the album. On the opposite end of the spectrum is “Isn’t It A Lovely Night?” an interminably wussy love song with couplets like “Here we made a bed of boughs/ And thistledown that we had found to lay upon the dewy ground.”

Because of the ridiculous story, which culminates (spoiler alert!) in The Rake’s children coming back as ghosts and seeking their revenge on him, the problem with the album is that it doesn’t work as a complete piece. Just like any other Decemberists album, it has a few really great songs and a few lame ones. No matter how much this album seems intended to be a complete listen, and no matter how layered this piece is with arcane instruments like bouzoukis, marxophones and harpsichords, it remains an album you’re bound to skip around on. “The Wanting Comes In Waves/ Repaid” is an absolutely beautiful song, which stands up to the best things the Decemberists have recorded. “The Rake’s Song,” is an instant classic. The album ends quite well with the slide-guitar tinged “The Hazards of Love 4 (The Drowned).” But, with each song bleeding artfully into the next, you begin to notice how everything sort of sounds the same. So much care has been put into constructing the unmemorable story and characters that Meloy seems to have forgotten to include a memorable melody in most songs.

Still, it’s another batch of songs from The Decemberists, no better or worse or more or less interesting than any other. But I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the intended reaction. Oh well. At least Margaret and William are occasionally charming, and The Rake, at least, will never be forgotten. Just don’t think too hard about their story. 

C+

Tags: decemberists album review hazards of love prog-rock
April 1, 2009 at 4:31pm ∞