I've listened to the Decemberists' latest album, The Hazards of Love, twice through so far and read countless reviews of it, and I'm still kind of torn about it, to the point where I've been sporadically bothering my friends all day to ask their opinion.
One minute I adore the lilting melody of "Won't Want for Love (Margaret in the Taiga)"; the next I want to tear my hair out over the overtly metal nonsense that is "The Queen's Rebuke/The Crossing." I've wavered between getting sucked into the album's overarching plot (more on that later) and dismissing the entire thing as too weird for words. It's hard for me, because I adore the Decemberists beyond all reason, to the point where I regularly yell "WE LOVE YOU COLIN!" at the stage at their concerts. I've spent years defending the band against its standard criticisms: their music is weird, their references obscure, their lyrics pretentious as all get-out.
But I'm going to say it: The Hazards of Love is weird, obscure and pretentious. It's a prog-rock opera in the grandest sense of the word, with dense, pulsing guitar riffs and crashing organs and a surprising amount of what metal would sound like if Led Zeppelin was planted in 1872. The whole album is a loosely connected story about a heroine named Margaret, her lover/baby daddy/son of the Forest Queen, William (who turns into a fawn during the day, randomly), said Forest Queen, and the Rake, who, sadly, is not a common garden tool, but a widower who murdered his children because he missed being a bachelor. Whew.
True to form, frontman Colin Meloy warbles delightfully throughout the album, and the band brings on guest singers to voice Margaret and the Forest Queen. Becky Stark provides suitably waifish vocals for Margaret, but props to Colin for getting Shara Worden to sing as the Forest Queen. Even as the band descends into metal sludge halfway through the album, Worden's soulful growl slides above it all. She absolutely owns her half of "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid," one of the best songs on the album.
The Hazards of Love is ambitious and grandiose and sometimes insane, and a lot of the time, this works. Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for the Decemberists' 2004 EP The Tain, which had a lot of the same epic elements, but I occasionally found myself drifting off in its dense melodies and climactic chords. It's not an album to pull a few catchy singles off, but as a cohesive musical whole, it works. It's easy to forgive the band for the distracting, stuttering distortion on "The Abduction of Margaret" when it's followed by the absolutely gorgeous folk tune "Annan Water." And some of the prog is, admittedly, pretty good -- "The Rake's Song" features some deeply disturbing lyrics but subversively catchy rock. For the most part, the album slides between thick prog rock and sweet, poignant love songs, each song bleeding seamlessly into the next.
That being said, part of the Decemberists' charm once lay in the fact that they could mesh epics like "The Crane Wife 1 & 2" with folk-pop goodness like "O Valencia!" on the same record. Hazards is all epic and no pop, which -- while it produces some crazy and interesting musical concepts -- kind of saddens me. Seasoned Decemberists fans know that Colin Meloy can make a song about a lost bicycle sound like the best thing you've heard in days. He doesn't need to sing about a shape-shifting fawn-man to convince us of his musical genius.
It's interesting to compare Hazards to the Decemberists' EP series, Always the Bridesmaid, released last fall. While Hazards represents what I think everyone's been fearing a little bit ever since The Tain -- the giant, inaccessible, "oh-god-what-were-they-thinking" concept album -- the EP series is almost a return to how the band began: sweet, melodic ditties about things as ordinary as a rainy day or a road trip through New England.
It's fun to rock out a little to The Hazards of Love, and the album definitely has its high points. And you have to give the band credit for taking on such an ambitious project, even if it falls a little flat at times. But for me, the Decemberists will always be about the mesh of the epic and the mundane, the pairing of wonderfully complex lyrics with choruses that will get stuck in your head for days. That's not Hazards, not by a long shot. But something tells me that Colin Meloy won't be sticking with Rakes and fawns for long.
Download: "Annan Water," "The Rake's Song," "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid"
I don't know how I feel yet (still trying to figure this out before I write MY review), but this is gorgeously written. Nice job.
ReplyDeleteThis is going to sound awkward in comparison to your wonderfully written piece, but I'm going to come out and say it anyway.
ReplyDeleteThere is absolutely NO way to describe this album's concept that does not make me lol endlessly. Really.
Alex gave me The Rake's Song, which I enjoyed/was disturbed by, but I'm almost glad to hear that the album as a whole isn't necessarily worth it because reigniting my love for the Decemberists right before a new tour may not be something I can afford.
I think it's worth it. It's going to be hard to pull songs from this to do in concert without if fitting in awkwardly with the Sporting Life and Mariner's Revenge Songs of the world, but I definitely anything new. Yes, it falls flat a little, I was lost with the abduction of Margaret, but I say anything new is good. They retained their sound while still experimenting and venturing into other realms. Isn't that what we want musicians to do? Otherwise they will get bored of playing the same thing or the same sound and we won't be able to scream "I LOVE YOU COLIN" into 40 year old ears standing in front of us in a few years. People always have criticisms of bands branching out from what's familiar and loveable about them, but they either stumble across something amazing in the process or realize they need to reel it in and stick to what they know. As I said in our AIM/Skype conversation, seeing a band, and their songs, evolve over time is part of the coolest part of going along for the ride of a band's history. The Decemberists are always strange, but that makes them loveable and unique and in a way, an aquire taste. I say while they can cross the line into creepy, I don't think they're trying to be condescending, save that for those in this world who fit Say Anything's "Admit it!!!"
ReplyDeleteAaaand I've ranted instead of searching for journals from the 1800s for too long now. Get back to me and we will debate because if I think I go on about this anymore to Dan he'll be scare like when I ranted about Twilight (scared silences included). Cheers!