indie | Through the Shattered Lens

Apparently this leaked in mid-December, but with all the holiday hassle I’ve only this weekend been able to start catching up on music again.

So, I’m on my third listen through this at the moment, and I’m kind of stumped on how to discuss it without revisiting their entire discography. I think if any other band released The King is Dead I wouldn’t give it the time of day. At face value it’s a standard countrified rock album that doesn’t present anything particularly special. I’ll even go so far as to say if The Decemberists released it five years ago it would have marked their end as the kings of indie rock. (Pun slightly intended?) But it has to be considered in its proper place and time.

Colin Meloy’s lyrical brilliance has been present since the get-go. Anyone who’s heard their “5 Songs” EP from 2001 should recognize in My Mother was a Chinese Trapeze Artist the same wit that prevailed in later, more famous works.

What did change over the years was their quality as musicians and song-writers. “5 Songs” boasted nothing comparable in musical creativity to 2002’s Cataways and Cutouts. With each new album a higher bar was set, and practically every song that followed rose to the challenge. Lyrically, Meloy probably peaked in 2005, with The Mariner’s Revenge Song on Picaresque.

From there the comedy act was cut back; Meloy returned to a more subtle cleverness. The band took the same turn musically, and with 2006’s The Crane Wife reached what might be the highest point in indie music. If not the most inspired album of the genre–I reserve that title for Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea–I have to consider it the all-around best. Here are Yankee Bayonet and Sons and Daughters as examples.

Then, in 2009, The Hazards of Love happened. It wasn’t completely unprecedented; in 2004 they released The Tain EP, an experimental break from their standard sound, which attempted, quite successfully I think, to create something far more thematic and sophisticated than mere indie rock. The Hazards of Love added to this 18 minute experiment five years of experience, and produced what can only really be described as a rock opera. Coming in at just under an hour, the album is a single piece, not a collection of independent songs. It deserves to go down in history as one of the greatest musical accomplishments of all time. It can’t be captured in a single movement, but here are two excerpts to give you an idea.

Now it’s 2011, about time for a new album, and I don’t think the band need be too full of themselves to ask “Where the hell do we go from here?” They surely knew they couldn’t top what they’d just accomplished any time soon, so they didn’t even bother trying. Is The King is Dead a “safe” album? A sort of “sorry guys” to the fans who just weren’t prepared for the intensity and complexity of Hazards of Love? Hardly, though it could be misconstrued as such. I think it’s The Decemberists coming down off their own high. I imagine it’s difficult to be as… musically intelligent as they are without some fear of becoming pretentious. Getting back to some good old country rock was the natural thing to do. I don’t imagine anyone expected to hear another Hazards of Love, but don’t be disappointed that it’s not another Crane’s Wife either. It’s pretty damn good for what it is, it just doesn’t reach for the stars.

I’ll post up four songs from the new album. Don’t Carry It All is the opening track. It’s worth noting that the fiddle and accordion interlude in Rox in the Box is from the Irish traditional song Raggle Taggle Gypsy (see variations by The Irish Descendants and The Chieftains). It’s not worth noting that This is Why We Fight, which I decided not to post, sounds like it’s straight off an Our Lady Peace album, and furthermore that my obsession with Our Lady Peace is a very embarrassing secret.

Don’t Carry It All