Music Review: The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love

For some bands, a project this arty, this intellectually pretentious, would be the kiss of death. I’m still baffled by how the Decemberists manage to pull it off. A 17-song cycle peopled with rakes and maidens and woodland queens and a shape-shifting fawn – yeah, that’s just what the hip-hop generation has been asking for.

But after the breakthrough success of 2006’s The Crane Wife, the Decemberists were emboldened to head full-tilt in the direction of folk-rock opera. It’s surely the only new indie CD with such deliberately archaic language and poetic imagery – an outpouring of bowers and willows and garlands and thistles. “But with this long last rush of air / Let’s speak our vows in starry whisper,” declares the hero, as he and his girlfriend drown themselves on the last track. Hey, party on.

And yet it does work, no doubt because lead singer/songwriter Colin Meloy is so darn invested in the project. The songs naturally suit his folksinger tenor, with its nasal quaver; he drops easily into ballad-like repetitions and alliteration, and his affinity for minor keys and Celtic melodic intervals pumps up the project with yearning and sorrow (is it just coincidence that Meloy’s name is an abbreviated form of the word “melancholy”?).

Forget the usual album strategy of assembling a set of songs with distinctly different sounds; on The Hazards of Love, melodic themes are repeated like operatic leitmotifs, woven together in a haunting (some might say humorless) minor-key tapestry, anchored by four linked songs titled “Hazards of Love.” Individual tracks matter less than the drama of the story’s arc, although certain tracks do function like arias, melodically underscoring the characters’ personalities. Guest singers have been enlisted to ramp up the dramatic texture — the Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark lends her sweetly plangent voice to the fragile heroine Margaret, while My Brightest Diamond’s Shana Worden sings the Queen with brassy fervor. Compare Meloy’s earnest vocals as the hero William to his snide delivery as the amoral Rake, whom the Queen hires to get Margaret out of the way. What could easily have turned into a bloodless, effete vanity project somehow is rescued by the Decemberists' counterintuitive artistic choices. Sure, the acoustic guitars and hammered dulcimers and cellos get a workout, but the instrumentation is just as likely to be bashing drums, power-chord electric guitars, and cacophonic synthesizers. Meloy professes a fondness for Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, as well as more obvious influences like Fairport Convention, and that crash of classic metal gives the fairy tale blood, grit, and spine.

Article Author: Holly Hughes

Holly A Hughes has been a rock 'n roll fan since February 9, 1964. She's heard it all, on vinyl, cassettes, 8-track tapes, CDs, and mp3 files. But so long as it's got a good beat, she'll dance to it.

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