| |
Music reviews |
The Decemberists - Her Majesty the Decemberists
Great lyrics and 19th-century imagery; when it's good, it's amazing. But it's not consistently good.
Kill Rock Stars
Release date: 9/9/03
Rating: B-1. Shanty for the Arethusa 5:37
2. Billy Liar 4:08
3. Los Angeles, I'm Yours 4:17
4. The Gymnast, High Above the Ground 7:13
5. The Bachelor and the Bride 4:12
6. Song for Myla Goldberg 3:33
7. The Soldiering Life 3:48
- (mp3 from Kill Rock Stars)
8. Red Right Ankle 3:29
9. The Chimbley Sweep 2:53
10. I Was Meant for the Stage 7:02
11. As I Rise 2:14There’s a long-standing micro-genre of rock records – maybe you could call it “sepia-toned rock” – in which it’s forever 1880. Rutherford Hayes is still president, everyone’s wearing crinoline collars and handlebar mustaches, the streets are clogged with urchins and bootblacks, and the landscape abounds with steam trains and shipwrecks, coal chimneys and carnivals, harmonicas and accordions.
What’s funny is that the few albums that attempt this do it quite well. I’m thinking of The Band’s entire output (look at that period cover photo on 1970’s The Band), R.E.M. from Reckoning to Document (especially Fables of the Reconstruction), Grant Lee Buffalo’s Mighty Joe Moon, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and now Her Majesty the Decemberists by Portland, Oregon’s Decemberists.
The Decemberists take their name from an obscure rebellion of Russian aristocrats who sought to topple the czar in 1825. And they’ve taken on the challenge of winning listeners while writing songs filled with references almost as obscure and outdated as their namesakes – while at times being as pretentious as you’d expect a band to be after taking on a name like that.
Though there are missteps, the Decemberists rise mightily to this challenge in Her Majesty, their second full-length album. There is no shortage of accordions – in fact, the album features well over a dozen instruments from pedal steel guitar to glockenspiel to dobro to Wurlitzer theater organ. But what make the Decemberists worth a lot more attention than most indie-rock noodlers are singer-songwriter Colin Meloy’s lyrics. The songs tell individual stories, or at least offer very vivid vignettes. This is a rare lyric sheet that’s actually fun to read even when the music’s off. Meloy even had me reaching for my dictionary on occasion.
His verse is reliably suffused with nineteenth-century imagery: packet boats, whalebone corsets, sallow-cheek’d ladies, holes in tarlatan, sleet falling on slate roofs, and of course knickers and pantaloons. As well as gorgeous nonsense: seraphim swimming in seaweed, “languor on divans, dalliant and dainty,” and – my personal favorite – “the tale of the Jewess and the Mandarin Chinese boy” (a tale that, naturally, goes nowhere). As you might expect, it’s easy to get carried away with all this, and Meloy’s lyrics sometimes end up too far over the top – as when he insists on repeating “funiculi, funicula” on “Song for Myla Goldberg” – but even at its most flowery it’s still fun to have so many images thrown at you in such rapid-fire fashion.
The opener, “Shanty for the Arethusa,” is a spare ballad about ragtag sailors off at night “on a clipper that’s bound for South Australia. The water’s warm there, the natives dark and nubile.” Like a ship struggling to emerge from the doldrums, the song builds slowly, then dies down again, with sound effects of creaking masts and the footsteps of dead sailors’ ghosts in the background. Eerie and excellent.
“Billy Liar,” which appears to be about a slacker who’s fond of masturbation, is relentlessly catchy, borrowing that same “Penny Lane” plinking-piano theme that Elliott Smith used to great effect in 1998’s “Baby Britain.” The third track, “Los Angeles, I’m Yours” – one of the only songs that clearly takes place in the present day – glories in the shallowness of Southern California, accompanied by smarmy early-seventies strings. It’s both great and awful at the same time. It’s followed by “The Gymnast, High Above the Ground,” a ballad with a striking chorus but absolutely no reason to be more than seven minutes long.
I’ve been most drawn to the fifth track, “The Bachelor and the Bride,” which beguilingly combines poignant lyrics, a driving rhythm and a haunting guitar riff, with a perfect bass-guitar-and-drum break covering the last 45 seconds or so. More than once has this song, one of the album’s least baroque, had me reaching for the “repeat” button.
In fact, “Bachelor” leads off a fantastic four-song stretch that is the true heart of the album. The uptempo, 3 ˝ - minute “Song for Myla Goldberg” borrows heavily from the Kinks of thirty-five years ago, from its pounding swinging-London drumbeat to the Hammond organ at the song’s close. “The Soldiering Life” is the jauntiest, bounciest tune you’ll ever hear about homoerotic love in the trenches during World War I. “Red Right Ankle” is a beautiful acoustic ballad, easily the album’s prettiest song, though I have no idea what it’s about.
The mid-album streak of brilliance screeches to a halt with “The Chimbley Sweep,” a very annoying, accordion-heavy jig, in what sounds like 2/4 time, about a Victorian street urchin. The melodramatic, probably autobiographical “I Was Meant for the Stage” then slowly tests your patience with seven slow minutes of a slow buildup to a slow (though pretty) chorus. Her Majesty closes with the inoffensive, shuffling, but forgettable 2-minute “As I Rise.” None of these latter tracks is particularly compelling; the Cliff’s Notes version of Meloy’s lyric sheet could easily leave them out.
This is an uneven album, combining many soaring high points amid other failed experiments, throwaway songs and moments of boredom. This criticism – along with the calico-and-lace lyrics and the nasal-voiced, prominent lead vocals – have led many to compare The Decemberists to the late-90s band Neutral Milk Hotel, part of the Elephant 6 indie-pop collective. I find the comparison fitting, though the Decemberists have a more accessible sound. NMH never attempted the pop touches heard on “Billy Liar,” “Myla Goldberg” or even “The Bachelor and the Bride.”
Of course, accessibility isn’t your goal if your band is named after failed Russian revolutionaries and your lyrics are right out of Emma or Billy Budd. Nonetheless, if the Decemberists can prove capable of filling entire albums with the flashes of genius heard here, they are going to be around for a while, and will gather a following to rival those of their sepia-toned rock forebears.
