Excursions

Artist: The Decemberists
Album: The Hazards of Love
Year: 2009

In the battle for the pop artist’s attention, the melody of a song usually ends up dominating the lyrics. The cost of this fight is usually an infantile rhyme like “Those who are dead are not dead / They’re just living my head”. Thanks for that introspective examination of life and death, Coldplay. Part of me feels stupider every time I sing along to your music.

For several albums, The Decemberists have taken these two warring parties and united them, finding new and unusual melodies which they then use to tell wonderfully verbose stories, like their interpretation of an old Chinese myth on “The Crane Wife”. On their new release, however, they’ve indulged their literary tendencies to the extent that listening to the album feels like listening to a musical. Melody is subservient to the story. There are sudden changes in tempo and mood. Secondary characters are sung by secondary voices. It’s not bad, per se, but the dart is stuck at an awkward angle in the wall, where previous albums hit the bullseye.

This closing track is a happy exception to much of the rest of the album, and serves as a great teaser for other tracks like the richly illustrated “Shanty for the Arethusa” (lead off line: “We set to sail on a packet full of spice, rum, and tea leaves / We’ve emptied out all the bars and the Bowery hotel”) or the Wes Anderson-ish “The Sporting Life”.