The Decemberists, The King is Dead
Reviewed by: Christian Hagen
It seems there’s no end to Colin Meloy’s devotion to classic American and British musical styles. Made famous for reviving subtly captivating folk storytelling wrapped in wit and maddening literacy with The Decemberists’ Castaways and Cutouts, Meloy spent the band’s next two albums, plus an odd EP or two, reminding the American indie scene where their rock heroes can find the backbone of their songcraft, where all American popular song originated. Along the way, he pulled his band into political pop, frightening sea shanties, and string-laden love songs.
But something odd happened in the midst of the band’s fourth album, 2006’s The Crane Wife: They learned to rock, and rock hard. The grind and stomp of “When the War Came” was exhilarating and, by the end, somewhat exhausting to fans used to a sweeter, more cool-tempered band. Couple that with “The Island,” the album’s spectacular 12-minute epic that showcased, for the first time since 2004’s The Tain, that Meloy and the rest of the band had the capacity to grow, explode, and captivate within a complex narrative and a continuum of folk-to-rock. This, as it turned out, was only a teaser of what was to come.
2009’s The Hazards of Love was the great culmination of everything the band had done before, dressed in costumes and performed under bright lights with blood, special effects, guest stars. Such a monumental concept album, in 17 unbroken tracks, had eluded American rock for many years. And Meloy’s manic plot, with shape-shifting animals and forest queens, was as ambitious as it was fresh to their audience. They really tried something, something bigger and bolder and more extraordinary than anything they’d seen anyone in the current scene do, with the possible exception of Sufjan Stevens.
It’s no surprise, then, that the album greatly divided critics and fans, becoming perhaps the greatest “love-it-or-hate-it” album of the year of its release. It’s the curse of any concept album that it draws focus into too many things at once, and, depending on how clearly the audience is willing to focus on the music, it can cause confusion, even boredom.
It’s because of this mixed response that the critical narrative surrounding The Decemberists’ new album, the ominously titled The King Is Dead, has been that this is a “return to form.” The idea is that the band has abandoned the grandiose rock opera style in favor of the stripped-down, simple aesthetic that they harbored in their early days. But while this seems to make sense in theory, in that The King is Dead is certainly a more mellow, stripped-down affair than Hazards, it doesn’t capture the real intrigue behind Meloy and co.’s latest foray.
The truth is simply that everything about The Hazards of Love was steeped in classic rock and folk styles, littered with ancient literary references and tropes, and it was as much a revival of popular music’s past as anything the band did before, if not more so. It may have been an experimental album for a notoriously quiet band, but in terms of its genre definitions, it was very clearly grounded in the past, as is everything Colin Meloy has ever done. And The King is Dead follows this same pattern.
The more interesting narrative to me, then, isn’t so much how The King is Dead reverses the path of the band’s career, but how it continues it, and what that continuation says about The Decemberists in the long term.
The first word that will come to the mind of a listener of the new Decemberists album is undoubtedly “country.” And this is apt and wholly reasonable, because The King is Dead has more twang and fiddle than anyone likely expected from the heroes of Portland. “Rox in the Box” is a pure hoedown with a countdown chorus that begs to be sung by a bar full of reveling drunks. “Down By the Water” certainly bears the marks of guest guitarist Peter Buck’s R.E.M. chops, but take away the reverb, and you’ve got an easy-going Southern rock tune. “All Arise!” couldn’t be better set than in a barn dance on a summer night.
But unlike the band’s tributes to British coffeehouse folk or classic prog-rock, this may be the first album in which Meloy’s voice is somewhat an ill fit. Beneath the twang of the slide and the plunk of the banjo, there’s a strange feeling of insincerity. With Meloy’s strained but otherwise straightforward vocal style, it sounds like a stranger from a foreign land doing a poor imitation of the locals, and not quite finding the right notes.
This isn’t to say the album is bad. Nor is it entirely buried in classic country swing. Much of the album does seem to touch the ground where the group has walked before, even if it does seem a bit further south of the Mason-Dixon than their usual fare. And the album’s strongest track, the rolling fire of “This is Why We Fight” is as satisfying as anything the band’s ever produced in the “call to action rock uplift” department, notwithstanding the pervasive harmonica, which, by this point in the album, is a bit overused. But it’s the distant, crackling sample at the end of that song which highlights the album’s main problem: While the band has made a strong living emulating, and occasionally bettering, their influences, this time the tribute falls flat. They’ve simply gone into a realm outside their strengths, and the production seems a bit bored by its aims.
But the fact that this is a weaker effort is okay specifically because the overall critical narrative is wrong: The band isn’t moving backward, but rather meandering off the path and testing unknown waters. The Decemberists are a link to rock’s past, but they don’t dwell too much on their own, and that’s what keeps them interesting and worthwhile. As long as they don’t try to forget their more dramatic transformations, they shouldn’t have to, as they’ll always have defenders and detractors no matter what they attempt to do.
So maybe they made an album that’s not up to the level of their talents. Guaranteed, they’ll keep moving forward.