The Decemberists – Crane Wife
Capitol – 4 ½ Stars (Sorry, Noah)

Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is a luxury liner of a tome, clocking in at around 700 pages of typically Russian overtalk. Most people give it up after about 250 hard-fought pages. “It’s like Dostoevsky sat down and said, ‘I’m going to write the human condition’, and he didn’t realize what he’d gotten himself into” a friend of mine once said. And it’s not like Dostoevsky is the only writer to take this task on; he’s simply made the most palatable and endearing attempt. And you know that Colin Meloy has read the whole thing.
At least that is what one may gather from the Decemberists’ major-label debut, Crane Wife. What makes it a particularly breathtaking record is the fact that Meloy et al. have not only managed to capture a portion of what makes us alive but that they have done so from an entirely first-person perspective. While their previous attempts to be Klezmer All-Stars certainly were not failures, the band could not shake the fact that they are from Portland in the 21st Century, not, say, Eastern Europe in the 18th. This time, when Colin Meloy tells us that the Shankill Butchers are “sharpening their cleavers and their knives / And taking all their whiskey by the pint,” he no longer appears in the Playbill as the Town Crier; he’s watching the action unfold for himself. This change in tone, from storyteller to witness, gives Crane Wife an authoritative, parable-like quality.
The entire record flows with the effortless emotion that the group flashed briefly in Castaways and Cutouts’ “California One / Youth and Beauty Brigade,” only sustained for an entire hour. One early emotional peak – there are many – occurs in “Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)” which finds Meloy a Union soldier and Laura Viers his bride. As the pair send their words off – he from the battlefield, she from a grand promenade – the listener wonders whether they will ever meet again, or if it is better for their love if they remain apart. There are two languages at work here, that of music and that of words. And as they send out the words — “But oh my love, though our bodies may be parted
/ Though our skin may not touch skin
/ Look for me with the sun-bright sparrow
/ I will come on the breath of the wind.” – we ache as a people. Or, as John Donne said, Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. The Decemberists may be telling stories, but they are stories of truth; Meloy may not have known how accurate he was in Picaresque’s “The Engine Driver” when he said “I am a writer, I am all that you have hoped on.”
Much has been made in the early reviews concerning the minor prog influence which shows up in Crane Wife, most notably in “The Island, Come and See, the Landlord’s Daughter, You’ll Not Feel the Drowning,” the first nine minutes of which come across as Yes all dressed up in a fake mustache and dusty bowler. It doesn’t work until the final gigue, when all the Casiotones have been locked away and the band return to their familiar instruments in austere reprise. The time we’ve spent suffering through the earlier sections – and it is a bit torturous – is now redeemed by the power of the pedal steel.
After nearly an hour of tragedy, comedy, murder, redemption, love, hate, and two songs about birds, the Decemberists settle into “Sons and Daughters,” building repetitively upon a foundation of accordion and acoustic guitar into a truly grand crescendo; a tale of having arrived, having finished the race. The tension in Crane Wife raises and drops with Shakespearian precision, each track carefully calibrated to bring out the best in its neighbors. By the time the group lean into “Sons and Daughters,” we share the looks of proud determination on their faces. It’s a celebration of the spirit that triumphs over heartbreak, over agony, over being alive.
It’s hard not to give this record a perfect review, because by the time “Crane Wife 1 and 2” fade into “Sons and Daughters,” any early missteps have been completely redeemed. And for a record about the human condition, Crane Wife has done exactly what it set out to do; we are willing to forgive the nine minutes of noodling in “The Island,” the faux-reggae of “The Perfect Crime 2,” and the U2-esque “When the War Came” because of the overall triumph of the album as a whole. It is not a perfect record, but it is hard not to see it as one. As we look back at the rest of it through the lens of its finale, it is hard not to love Crane Wife as the sum of its parts; here’s hoping that the we can look at the one another the same way.

The Decemberists – Picaresque [Kill Rock Stars]
5 Stars

The Decemberists live in a world of fake moustaches, newspaper men with press cards in their hatbands, and bootblacks.  Their albums have always been firmly rooted in the past, both musically and lyrically.  Guitars have competed for attention with accordions, horns of bizarre shapes and sizes, and pedal steel guitars.  Not quite neo-folk, not quite country, not quite punk rawk, not quite indie; they’ve invented their own genres and audiences.  Their latest release for Kill Rock Stars, Picaresque, manages to straddle the line between traditional Decemberists work (which may be a bit redundant) and more popular stylings.  While they will never be as big as, say, Modest Mouse, the Decemberists are setting themselves up to become one of the most important indie groups since Neutral Milk Hotel.

While every Decemberists album feels like a series of skits from the world’s greatest middle school musical, Picaresque graduates to masterpiece theatre.  Where many writers would simply dictate the details of their story, Meloy creates delicate, reverent character sketches.  The listener can’t help but feel for the suicidal couple in “We Both Go Down Together” or the lovelorn spy in “The Bagman’s Gambit”.  The male prostitutes in “On the Bus Mall” really are “kings among runaways” in Meloy’s world.   “The Sporting Life” easily laps Belle and Sebastian’s “The Stars of Track and Field” in its fey sports star glory.  Meloy sings for every 98 pound weakling who ever tripped in front of a soccer goal as he sighs “There’s my girlfriend arm in arm/with the captain of the other team.”  The action in the Decemberists’ songs seems to take place at a distance, even when told in first person.

The album’s first half is actually quite standard Decemberists fare:  mostly acoustic ostentations  on vaguely reminiscent characters.  While these songs are good, and in the case of “The Bagman’s Gambit”, great, they do not compare to the five songs which end the album.  “Mariner’s Revenge Song” may very well hold the much-coveted and competed-for title of Most Epic Decemberists Song.  Having nothing to do with Coleridge’s “Rhime of the Ancient Mariner” (which would not be a surprise from every English major’s favorite band), it recounts the story of a mariner who, in the belly of a whale, traps the sea captain who betrayed him several lives before.  The language in the song is brutally visceral, particularly when compared to the rest of the album, but the change of pace works in its favor.

If “Mariner’s Revenge Song” is the most epic Decemberists song, “Engine Driver” is the saddest with its Springsteen-esque characterization of working class romance.  One can’t help but reflect on the deadening blue-collar power of lines like “There are power lines/in our bloodlines”.  The chorus of “Engine Driver” sounds fairly trite (“If you don’t love me/let me go”) on paper, but when Meloy’s whine mixes with  Jenny Conlee’s gorgeous melody in the final movement, the song stops being great and simply transcends any previous knowledge of what a good song is.  And then there’s “Sixteen Military Wives”, Meloy’s first trip down Political Lane.  Where most of the songs sound like relics from seventeenth century pirate ships, “Sixteen Military Wives” is a shift into the decidedly modern 1970s.  Over a blissfully poppy horn arrangement, Meloy compares soldier’s wives to the Motion Picture Academy, voter apathy to voter apathy.  Material that should be a downer, yes, but the Decemberists treat the sarcastic chorus of “America does if America says it’s so!” like a cheer rather than a warning.  The song’s strange juxtaposition of the upbeat and dreary make it the album’s shining moment.

Album after album, song after song, Meloy continues to write contemporary classics.  The Decemberists reach back to make music that is completely innovative in its archival outlook.  Chances are they will never break through (unless the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie sparks renewed interest in sea shanties), but Picaresque indicates that they will continue to release perfect albums until well after the Sixteenth Century folk revival (It’s just around the corner.  You heard it here first.).