For the Decemberists, perhaps it’s not love that they should
be wary of, but the hazards of rock operas, which are thorny indeed.
For their fifth LP, The Hazards of Love, the Portland band bites
off a mammoth-sized chunk of complex narrative, complete with
shape-shifters, folk staples, ’70s metal riffing, and a labyrinthine
maze of baroque phrasing. It’s epic.
But is it too much? Is this thistle (albeit a pretty whistle) of an
album worth the effort it takes to embrace it? Initially the 17-song
suite is not an easy album to love or understand; it requires a
Herculean feat of concentration to follow the storyline, and as its
wash of music flows from one song into the next with nary a breath
between, it can feel a bit like flailing in a dark well. But the album
is rewarding, heady stuff—beautiful, lush, and evocative, a
gratifying listen from start to finish in an impatient era of singles.
It may take a concerted effort, but the Decemberists’ newest is a
grand, ambitious piece of work that gets better and better on
repeat.
According to the Decemberists’ raconteur Colin Meloy, it wasn’t so
easy to make either. “I don’t think I’ll do anything like The
Hazards of Love for a long time. It was an experiment with a
different mode of making a record—something that was so
painstakingly thought out, very cerebral in its way. It was a record
where we had to break everything up into 30 separate pieces and work on
them individually. I don’t think I would want to repeat it… at least
not anytime soon,” he says, adding that he’s working on songs for a new
album with a more American-folk bent.
Sitting at the downtown Stumptown Coffee, Meloy wouldn’t delve into
the album’s plot—I assumed because he was tired of rehashing the
story of William and Margaret and their star-cross’d love affair.
“Actually, I haven’t [talked about the story] ’cause when we did The
Crane Wife, I was telling that story so many times I almost swore
off doing anything with a narrative. But with this [album] I think it’s
safe to say that it should be left up to the listener to really devise
their own narrative. It’s just a pastiche of folk song tropes sewn
together, so it’s supposed to be an abstracted narrative.”
Meloy notes that the names Margaret and William have popped up again
and again in folk songs throughout the ages. “They’re kind of
archetypal names for archetypal characters. Margaret is the innocent
ingénue. William, her love interest, is often poor and sort of
marries up. Yeah, Margaret and William are the everyman and everywoman
of folk songs,” Meloy explains. “I think it’s because the cadence of
the names sound good in songs, but also so many of these stories come
from the same place at a time before recorded music. People were half
remembering songs, and those songs became different songs that
maintained the bones.”
Meloy, an antiquer of words and folk songs, doesn’t consider himself
a thespian on The Hazards of Love, even though he sings the
first-person vocals of William and the Rake, two wildly dissimilar
roles. “I wasn’t imagining playing different characters. I didn’t want
theatricality to distract from the music itself,” he says. First and
foremost, Meloy is a storyteller who saves songs from the gallows so
they can carry on, to be told again.