Wednesdays are usually hurried
affairs, where I race from work to the gym to guitar lessons and back
home. Today guitar lessons were
cancelled, so instead I practiced at home for a while and will now turn my
attention to some folks that already know how to play guitar, and write good
music while doing it.
Disc 490 is… The King is Dead
Artist: The
Decemberists
Year of Release: 2011
What’s up with the Cover? A lovely photo looking up at some conifers. This cover appeals to me. I’ve always found the woods a soothing place
to go, and these trees remind me of places near where I grew up.
How I Came To Know It: My friends Cat and Ross introduced me to the
Decemberists through a song on their 2006 album, “The Crane Wife” (reviewed
back at Disc 154) and I’ve been a fan ever since. “The King is Dead” was just me buying their
recent release when it came out.
How It Stacks Up: I have five Decemberists albums (I only had two when
I last reviewed them, so the collection is growing). “The King is Dead” is my clear favourite of
all of them. I’m only missing one of
their full length studio albums now, but I have a hard time believing it will
surpass “The King is Dead” when I do get it.
Rating: 5 stars
Tragically,
for many bands their first album is their best album. In the case of the Decemberists, it is the
reverse. Their most recent release, 2011’s
“The King is Dead” is the pinnacle of what they’ve done so far and leaves me
with high hopes on what will come next.
This
record is the perfect mix of reimagined sixties Brit-pop and modern American
folk music, which is the best combination modern indie music manages. It errs heavily on the side of folk, which is
the right side of this particular amalgam to err on.
Listening
to this album I was happily reminded of a street corner conversation I recently
had with my friend Lawrence, about how all the ‘kids these days’ thought they’d
reinvented music, but all they’ve actually done is rediscovered folk music. Welcome back, music world – me and a few
other folks have been keeping the seat warm for you.
Colin
Meloy writes a beautiful song, and the tastefully restrained ten tracks on “The
King is Dead” is his best work, taking very simple and beautiful constructions
and letting them stand on their own, without a lot of excess noise or production
wizardry that would only detract from the melodies.
I also
love Meloy’s voice on this record. He
has a vibrant and sprightly tone on all his records, but on “the King is Dead” it
is perfectly suited to these songs, which are both triumphant and tragic. These are songs to be sung out like anthems,
celebrating the world and refusing to let its darker parts drag you down.
Of
course anthems are a lot more than empty slogans; to work they have to have
something to say. The lyrics on this
record consistently move me, despite my ongoing insistence to overplay the
living hell out of every song.
The album
begins with “Don’t Carry It All,”
which is a song with a reminder that we are on this planet together, and need
to hold one another up as a community. I’ve
always felt that for all our cynicism, mankind’s greatest hope is that our next
evolutionary jump will be the one to true empathy. When I listen to “Don’t Carry It All” I feel the chasm of that jump is that much
smaller. Also, it has some of my favourite
lyrics in any folk song, and I’ve heard a few:
“A monument to build beneath the
arbors
Upon a plinth that towers t’wards
the trees
Let every vessel pitching hard to
starboard
Lay its head on summer’s freckled
knees.”
Every
time I hear this, I see those ships in my mind’s eye leaning hard into the
wind, a crew of sailors all leaning hard off the other side of the ship keeping
her course true. Those sailors are us,
my friends! Moreover, like the way Meloy ends the song with a healthy dose of
responsibility among the roses:
“So raise a glass to turnings of
the season
And watch it arc towards the sun
And you must bear your neighbour’s
burden within reason
And your labours will be borne
when all is done.”
I like
that within the teamwork, there is an understanding that we don’t have to carry
it all, but we do have to carry our part, and know the rest will work itself
out.
There
are two hymns on the album, “January Hymn”
and “June Hymn.” They’re not really
hymns in that they’re not religious in any way unless you count the type of
experience they give me when I listen to them.
“January Hymn” is a song of parting;
mournful and sere, just like January can be.
The chorus captures the single moment the song revolves around.
“What were the words I meant to
say before you left?
When I could see your breath lead
Where you were going to.”
There is
a beautiful disconnect expressed here, as Meloy cleverly writes the line to
intimate that the person the narrator wishes to speak his heart to has already
turned away – physically and otherwise.
A great song doesn’t beat you over the head with it; it establishes the
emotion and lets the words carry you through it.
“June Hymn” is, as you’d expect, the opposite
of its wintry cousin. Scenes of spring
abound, turning to the full bloom of summer and the possibilities of the future. Images of ‘Garland all the lawn’, ‘A
barony of ivy in the trees’ mingle with the human activity of ‘pegging clothing on the line’ but the
best line is the sound of birds blending their songs in the background:
“Here’s a hymn to welcome in the
day
Heralding a summer’s early sway
And all the bulbs coming in
To begin
The thrushes bleating with the
wrens
Disrupts my reverie again.”
Damn
that’s good stuff, and the music just makes it better. It made me download some chords and tabs just
in the hopes I can one day play it on guitar, and maybe add my own bleating to
the lyrics.
Even the
songs that appear to be a bit derivative, like “Rox in the Box” which lifts the traditional melody straight from
the folk classic “Raggle Taggle Gypsy”
does so as an homage, building on that tradition rather than stealing from
it. When I finally recognized why I knew
the riff so well it wasn’t a betrayal, it was a revelation.
On a completely
different note, I like that Meloy, with his heavy build, bad fashion and
awkward haircut, is able to have a good career and get noticed for his craft. Video temporarily killed the radio star, but
with video banished to the fractured audience of Youtube, the radio star is
making a comeback online. Hooray for
those who have the music, ugly or otherwise.
“The
King is Dead” is only forty minutes long soaken-wet, and when it ends it leaves
you wanting more. In fact, it left me
that way so many times I kept listening to it instead of writing the review and
moving on. Sorry for the delay on the CD
Odyssey as a result, but it couldn’t be helped.
This record inspires me, and moreover it reminds me that I can still be
inspired by music being written today as much as music from forty years ago. For all the young people being inspired for
the first time this way, I can only hope that they go on to do great things,
musically or otherwise. I’ll raise a
glass to the turning of that season.
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