Accidental Fan: The Decemberists

There are times where a strange set of circumstances leads me to a new infatuation. So it was with the Decemberists. Back in the day when I used to Google daily on 'Horslips' (in 2004 I was not yet familiar with Google News Alerts), I stumbled across a Boston Globe review of a Portland Oregon indie band that had had the nerve to do a concept EP based on The Tain. The same band was in town that very week at the Great American Music Hall. And so on and so forth.

Inevitably, there could be comparisons between Horslips' own 1973 masterpiece and the Decemberists' 2001 oddity. Both have literary roots: the Horslips album quotes W.B. Yeats introducing Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), and Colin Meloy is on record crediting Thomas Kinsella's 1969 modernist edition as his inspiration. Found in a Portland bookstore. In the early days of the Bush administration. This cultural distance, in my opinion, is exactly why it is worth a listen with Meloy delivering a strangely unanchored and 'dislocated' take on the saga. Then there's the gap of years and the consciousness of style-experimentation from The Decemberists, who were thoughtfully exploring prog-rock and metal from an almost archaeological perspective at the time, as this review details:

Pitchfork Review: The Tain

"I never was a metal head," remarked Colin Meloy in an Earlash interview last July. "It's something in my later years I've come to regret a little bit just because everybody has their stories of when they were a metal head. And it wasn't until recently that I started listening to Black Sabbath and started appreciating it."

Two albums and a six-song Five Songs EP into their career, The Decemberists' are beginning to seriously define their sound; a sudden plunge into, say, heavy metal, seems unlikely. Yet the first movement of The Tain EP, the band's new 18-minute composition based loosely on the 8th-century Celtic Ulster cycle's central poem "Tain Bo Cuailinge", finds Meloy and the others most immediately concerned with-- am I about to say this?-- serious Ur-metal riffage. Granted, Decemberist metal is not going to weigh down the Dominique Leones of the world, but make no mistake: Never has this band sung a flag so black, a maiden so iron.

The opening of The Tain is indeed jarring, though there's always more than meets the ear with this band, and the disc's dark acoustic guitar opening is not without foil: Pay attention to how Colin overdramatizes the dark line with his heavy plucks, disarming its sense of foreboding. When the rest of the band joins him in unison, what should be enough of a killer riff for friendly genocide is undermined by the organ's funny whir and Rachel Blumberg's gentle cymbal taps. In short, the sound is off-kilter, though not without ample deception, and only hints at the level of sophistication to come in the remaining movements.

More at the link. And that was some time ago. The Decemberists are now signed to a major label, sell out dates in Dublin and San Francisco, have their newest album Crane Wife at the Starbucks counter near you and, once in a very great while, you even hear them on commercial radio.

Decemberists Homepage.

"For I am a poor and a wretched boy, A chimbley, chimbley sweep."

Tales from the Dark Side

The Decemberists let their inner weirdos shine, with songs that hark back to a literary tradition of gruesome morality tales and also embrace more modern abominations such as the Shankill Butchers. Singer Colin Meloy talks to Jim Carroll

A COUPLE of years ago, Colin Meloy had a day job in a bookstore in Portland, Oregon. "I remember one day seeing this children's storybook, The Crane Wife, coming into the store. I had an idle hour and I flicked through it and I was really taken by the story." When it came time for his band, American indie folk-rockers The Decemberists, to record their fourth album, that old Japanese tale about a poor peasant who nurses a sick crane back to health kept coming to mind. It seemed to be the perfect starting point for an album which Meloy felt could be both epic and quirky.

"It's an amazing story, and I suppose what I find interesting is that you have all these different themes about greed and curiosity and love running through it, which have an universal application beyond what that one tale is about."

The Crane Wife is a hugely ambitious undertaking for The Decemberists, one of the most thoughtful and bookish of America's new indie school. The album consists in the main of longform songs reminiscent in some ways to their earlier work, The Tain, which was based on the Ulster mythological story once also musically explored by Horslips. The Crane Wife is a major league outing from a band raising their game on every level.

Meloy has always taken an interest in ancient fables and tales, particularly the more gruesome ones.

More at the link.

I've been a fan of The Decemberists for about three years now. If my discovery of Horslips was nearly accidental, the path to The Decemberists was almost random in its happening. They first popped up years ago under a Googling of "Horslips-News" in an article in the Boston Globe. "And just who is this upstart Portland band who thinks they can do a concept album on the Táin?" I said as web engines ferreted out the official site. "Oh," sniffed I, once there, "Playing next week at the Great American Music Hall are they? Well. We'll just have to go see about THAT."

Came home with three of their albums.