The Decemberists

I have happened upon an album of musical wonderment. I shall tell you the journey though before I discuss the album. Recently I posted a poll on this blog asking my readership which CD I should buy. The bands all began with the letter D and were: The Dandy Warhols: Odditorium; The Decemberists: Hazards of Love; Dirty Pretty Things: Romance at Short Notice and Dinosaur Jr.: Farm. I had selected these artists by flicking through the letter D section in a record shop in Leicester and they all met the criteria of appropriate starting letter, released in the last year or two and looking like they might be my sort of thing. You see, I have allowed myself to become one of those people that only listens to music they listened to when they were a teenager. My only recent musical purchases have been new releases from bands who have been around for over half of my lifetime: Oasis: Dig Out Your Soul and Delirious: Mission Bell, and my CD purchase rate had slipped to an annual 0.29 average over the last seven years. HMV and Virgin used to be my second home, but now I content myself with the same songs that were my nightclub anthems in the days when jogging home after an evening of extravagant dancing and bone-jarring moshing until 2am wasn't an unusual occurrence.

I imagine many people are similarly stuck in a musical time warp, but I regret the fact that recent years don't have the soundtrack that my teenage years had. Certain songs evoke powerful memories: Idlewild's When I Argue I See Shapes reminds me of playing darts-cricket in my friend John Golds' bedroom; Oasis' Cigarettes and Alcohol reminds me of 16 year-old disillusionment and my parents' staircase; Richard Ashcroft's Song for the Lovers reminds me of when my friend Jason Oatway stole a poster from a nightclub and Ben and Jason's Adam and Lorraine reminds of the time my flat got burgled. The past seven years have sadly been a musical void. I think this is partly because I no longer give myself a space to listen to music in. It used to accompany my playing of computer games, but I no longer do that and my current activities are generally not conducive to extra sound. I shun music for Radio 5 discussion when I drive: I like to get angry about people's intolerant attitudes to immigration, and car music rare, my life has become tuneless.

Back to the poll which would remedy this lack; it was a dead heat with a minute to go between The Decemberists and Dinosaur Jr. My only link with either band was that when we (my family of wife Helen, and twin boys Ned and Jarvis) swapped abodes with some friends' friends this summer; the friends' friends had a framed picture from a Decemberists' show. I've never met the people that own the flat we stayed in, but their retro interior design, red fridge and decision to categorise their books not by author or genre, but by spine colour led me to the shallow conclusion that these were cool people and that anything they appreciated must also fall into the category: cool. With this in mind, I (in a slightly cheaty way) added the last vote to The Decemberists causing the vote to swing 60%-40% in their favour. A few minutes later and £5.99 had been spent and all I had to do was await the album delivery.

The album arrived yesterday and I genuinely think that even if I had widened my poll beyond the alphabetical constraints I would not have found a better, more interesting and beautiful album. The musical style is a combination of twangy acoustic dominated revelry and more grindy aggressive rumbustiousness. How do music journalists manage to keep their writing fresh when essentially they have to describe very similar guitar sounds? Music is one of the hardest things to describe. I feel I have failed to recreate what their music actually sounded like with my eccentric choice of words. I will throw into the mix that the Wikipedia author says they are "indie folk" and perhaps that will add to your imaginative recreation of them.

Fortunately it is not their music that I want to focus on primarily though, as whilst the music is at times tantalising and at times simply lovely, it is the story of the album that gripped me. Unbeknownst to me on purchase, this album is a kind of folk rock opera with the the combination of songs telling one coherent, although challenging to decipher, story. There are three vocalists voicing four main characters: Margaret, William, the Queen and the Rake. The story, in brief, goes like this: Margaret finds an injured faun which turns out to be William who is a shape-shifter (a faun by day, a man by night). They fall in love, get jiggy, get pregnant. The Queen is William's adoptive mother and she rescued him after he was abandoned in a "reedy glen". She put the shape-shifting spell on Will and she is none too happy that he has found a lover, but she agrees to let him join her for one more night. But, disaster strikes and the Rake, who has killed his three children after his wife died, abducts Margaret and the Queen, seeing this as an opportunity carries the Rake and Margaret beyond the Annan water and far away from William, but he goes in search of his beloved and manages to rescue her from the Rake, who is driven mad after being haunted by his dead children. However, they cannot recross the water and both tragically drown. It is a complex narrative to weave into seventeen songs with some of the tracks lyricless such as The Queen's Approach, forcing the listener to read the music to figure out what is happening. I love the ambition though and the lyrics are poetic and poignant: "O Margaret, the lapping waves are licking quietly at our ankles / Another bow, another breath: this brilliant chill has come to shackle".

The album is masterful, adventurous and I feel fortunate to have begun the refreshment of my music with such a great uninterrupted flow of tunes that create a genuine experience rather than an aloof detachment. It this personal inside-your-guts interaction which makes this album so special. I guess part of the reason that music has passed me by in the last few years is that it hasn't offered me anything new (I confess that I haven't searched very hard), just a recapturing of previously articulated emotions, but this album gave me a whole new musical experience. If you fancy a listen, start with The Rake's Song on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULSKZ7IP930