Well, 2014 is darn near over and I'm waiting on the new year to dawn before tackling any significant amount of new music. So in the meantime I thought it would be a neat to take a look at the current discography of one of my favorite bands, The Decemberists. To me, this band represents a turning point in my musical tastes; gone were the days where I thought the only legitimate form of music was Thrash Metal and in came a plethora of musical ideas and concepts that would forever alter the way I listened to music.
To start, I'm only going to cover the main album releases from The Decemberists, no EPs or live albums, though I will try to make mention of them if they relate to the current LP I'm reviewing.
The Decemberists are essentially a folk band, though that description is pretty limited since they also dabble in country, sea faring tales and on occasion some Pink Floyd esque psychedelia. However, folk was the prime focus on their first couple of releases, the Five Songs EP and their debut full length Castaways & Cutouts. On these two releases the band penned songs that dealt with love and death, but often through the lens of a character or odd story, all the while, using some pretty heady vocabulary, a trait that the band has never really abandoned.
C&C starts with the gloomy "Leslie Ann Levine" which tells the tale of a dead girl who is mourning her own lost life, this song sets the mood for the album perfectly and is easily in my top favorite Decemberists songs. Next there is the ever addictive and mesmerizing "Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect", a track that portrays a series of characters and is wrapped in the most wonderful electric guitar lead on the entire album.
The album for the most part is a collection of sadder, slower paced tracks, dealing with an unfortunate death ("Leslie Ann Levine"), a special memory ("Grace Cathedral Hill") or even the dark tale of a prostitute ("Cautionary Tale"). However, there are a couple of more upbeat moments, though these too have there an element of darkness to them; for instance, on "July, July" the driving chorus is punctuated with lyrics about blood running down a drain, or the late album burst of "Legionnaires Lament" where the narrator describes being stranded in a desert.
The album in my opinion does hit a small slump in the middle with the tracks "Odalisque" and "Cocoon" though that has more to do with the length of those tracks than the quality of the tracks themselves, something I found myself thinking about a lot of Tarkio's material (the band that frontman Colin Meloy was in previously).
Really, this album is a fantastic debut from a band that would only push their sound farther on successive albums. Though this is just the first review, I can honestly say that C&C is the one Decemberists album I can put on any time and while it isn't my absolute favorite, it is an LP that I hold near and dear.
9.0/10
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