A Timeless Wavelength

The Decemberists – The Wanting Comes in Waves / Repaid

Last September I caught The Decemberists on tour in support of their new album The Hazards of Love. I found it to be easily the best live show I’d seen in years.  And much of the reason for this is that the show was a throwback to a time when rock bands weren’t afraid to be entertaining.

The album in question was a concept album, and a rather convoluted one at that.  It seems to be set in some vague “olden times” somewhere between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century.  Its story is structured like a classic myth or fairy tale, though the actual plot is almost impossible to unravel.  It seems to have something to do with a mortal man who’s adopted by a fairy queen and can turn into a fawn and falls in love with a mortal woman and gets her pregnant (hopefully while he’s still in human form) and then she gets kidnapped by a rake who is haunted by the ghosts of his murdered children and… you know, it’s probably best not even to try to sort it out.

Musically, the album is all over the place, with baroque instrumentation interspersed with chunky, distorted ’70s hard rock guitar.  The heroine and the fairy queen are voiced, respectively, by guest vocalists Becky Stark and Shara Worden, both of whom accompanied the Decemberists on this tour.  While the stage show did not feature a full theatrical production as originally planned, just seeing the stage packed with musicians and vocalists was stunning enough — especially since many of them did not confine themselves to a single instrument. During “The Rake’s Song,” for instance, almost every member of the band was pounding away at drums or other percussion instruments in union, producing a wonderfully garish cacophony.  Other tracks were only a flute solo away from being a lost Jethro Tull hit.  The track featured here gives a pretty good glimpse of the grandeur of this album, featuring harpsichord, electric guitar, and an operatic dialogue between Worden and lead singer Colin Meloy.

The reason this live show was so spectacular was because it flew in the face of the “back to basics” ethos that has dominated rock music for the past thirty years.  It seems like every few years has spawned another musical movement that preached simplicity and shied away from grandstanding or virtuosity.  From punk to New Wave to grunge, complexity and showmanship were the enemies.  But by now the “back to basics” movement has become hegemonic in its own right, and it’s quite refreshing to see a small army of musicians in fancy suits wailing away on accordion and bouzouki to the tune of an epic rock opera.