Album tells a musical fairy tale

Only in a Decemberists album will you hear the word ‘irascible.’

It’s dropped in the third… Only in a Decemberists album will you hear the word ‘irascible.’

It’s dropped in the third track, ‘A Bower Song,’ amongst characteristically dark guitar and high vocals. With any other artist, listeners might pause and rewind the song, making sure they heard correctly. But ‘irascible’ and other lyrics pass almost unnoticed in this latest effort from Oregon’s band of hyper-literary rockers.

To those familiar with the group, such lyrical excess will probably come as no surprise. After all, this is the same band that’s built an album around a Japanese folktale (2006’s groundbreaking The Crane Wife), and spun yarns about mariners seeking revenge, mystical islands and undead barrow boys.

In its endlessly creative ballads, The Decemberists seems to inhabit an alternate universe — a fantastical, Victorian-era fairyland — that resides in the well-educated mind of singer Colin Meloy.

Fans will be happy to know that this fairyland is alive and well in The Hazards of Love.

Originally intended to be a musical, Hazards crafts a wild, often hard-to-follow narrative about a shape-shifting boy named William, and his lover, Margaret, who finds out that she’s pregnant. Margaret decides to venture across the forest to bring William this news, but the two lovers soon run into trouble, in the form of an evil forest queen and a murderous villain known as ‘The Rake.’

You can see how this might have been a difficult musical.

The album starts off calmly enough, as an eerie prelude gives way to an acoustic mediation on, of course, the hazards of love.

‘My true love went riding out in white and green and gray, / Past the Pale of Offa’s wall where she was wont to stray,’ sings Meloy.

The album then launches into ‘A Bower Song,’ and with it comes the dark guitar distortion that hangs around throughout the rest of the album.

Next up is ‘Won’t Want For Love.’ This is the first time we hear ‘Margaret’ — or Becky Stark of ‘Lavender Diamond’ — singing. Other guest stars soon follow suit, and overall, they’re welcome additions. Shara Worden, the evil queen, is an especially good bluesy antagonist. Just listen to ‘The Wanting Comes In Waves.’

The album also packs a few musical surprises, though not as many as in previous records. For instance, a romantic accordion is heard floating softly through ‘Isn’t It a Lovely Night?’ and a country-like steel guitar penetrates the melodies of many songs at random.

As epitomized in ‘Wanting,’ the music comes in waves, alternating between peaceful acoustic and evil blues-rock, and always maintaining a delicate emotional balance for the listener. Often, the music will even shift mid-song, as one singer — or character — steps in, with his or her own musical connotations.

This brings about the subject of the not-so-good part of this album.’ If you’re someone who needs to know what a song is about, you’ll probably find yourself constantly straining to understand the plot line, which can get a bit irritating — or irascible — to say the least. The plot-driven duets, in particular, don’t work.

It’s not helped by Meloy writing songs in ye olde English.

In previous albums, such flowery language was cool, but here The Decemberists seems to be overdoing it. For example, take the tongue-twister, ‘The prettiest whistles won’t wrestle the thistles undone’.

It comes down to this: The Decemberists is still a great band with an impressive ability and imagination. But because The Hazards of Love is so absorbed in the meticulous dictation of a storyline, the music becomes harder to engage with, and the album comes off feeling a bit artificial.

Sure, have guest stars, but don’t have plot-driven duets. Please, tell stories, but don’t let them overshadow the music itself. The Decemberists wasn’t careful and it alienated the audience. Maybe that is the real hazard.