I have now listened to the new Decemberists album four times and as one of The Few (that is, the few bands that I would, hypothetically, buy music from before hearing it) I now have some impressions.
My first impression upon hearing it was of a sort of very mild disappointment, not because I didn’t like what I was hearing, but because of the way that the songs float by serenely and there’s little there to (to paraphrase album track June Hymn) ‘disrupt your reverie.’ I like a little disruption; sometimes I like a lot of it, and previous Decemberists albums have been replete with all different kinds of musical surprises. So it was difficult to know how to take something so relatively simple, pastoral and generally fairly light.
The trademark storytelling, too, is done with a much broader brush. The album certainly builds a world and invites you into it, but it’s spread across the whole album, not in the sense of being a concept album like Hazards of Love but in contrast to something like Picaresque where each song felt like its own little world. Here the album gradually introduces recurring themes: the changing of the seasons, a sense of community and honest work, and also harships, menace and a threat to that way of life bubbling under the surface.
It’s in that way that the album gradually revealed its deeper charms to me. It’s an album that celebrates a simple way of life (where hardly anyone drowns), but also recognising the fragility of that and how easily it could disappear. It might never become my favourite Decemberists album, but it may well be the safest one to escape to.
You can listen to it here, for a while:
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/03/132436422/first-listen-the-decemberists-the-king-is-dead
