Home News Best New Music Reviews Albums Tracks Sunday Reviews 8.0 Reviews Features The Pitch Lists Guides Longform Rising Photo Galleries Video OverUnder Liner Notes Under the Influences Podcast Events Newsletter Advertising Masthead Careers Contact Accessibility Help More Pitchfork Pitchfork Music Festival Chicago Pitchfork Music Festival Paris Pitchfork Music Festival Berlin Pitchfork Radio Pitchfork Podcast Home News Reviews Best New Music Features The Pitch Video Podcast Staff Picks Events Toggle main navigation menu Open search module Expand audio player Home News Reviews Best New Music Features The Pitch Video Podcast Staff Picks Events Toggle main navigation menu Open search module Expand audio player The Decemberists Picaresque Kill Rock Stars 2005 8.3 Best new music by Stephen M.Deusner Contributor Rock March 23 2005 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Open share drawer The Decemberists may have built their rep on historical backdrops and quaint theatricality, but their third full-length trades much of that in for more ambitious narratives and dynamic playing.
Picaresque captures the band in peak form, packing in exotic instrumentation that creates a lush and evocative backdrop to Colin Meloys story-songs, which here are more colorful-- and more topical-- than ever. Its also as good a follow-up to Her Majesty the Decemberists any devoted fan could hope for. That album still retains its considerable charm, but the Decemberists sounded less like a band than a traveling troupe at the behest of fickle royalty. Here, as he plaintively proclaims on The Engine Driver, Meloy is a writer, a writer of fictions. As its title suggests, the album collects a compendiums worth of well-crafted story-songs, most of which sound more literary than theatrical (the nearly nine-minute Mariners Revenge Song excepted). In other words, the Decemberists are no longer the indie rock version of the Max Fischer Players; these songs are content to be songs, not one-acts, and the music is music, not sonic scenery. As a result, Picaresque sounds similar to Castaways and Cutouts and their live shows: The music is more dynamic and all the more evocative for not attempting to romantically conjure the past and filter it through Meloys imagination. Despite some historical backdrops, most of these narratives are set in the here and now, a milieu that suits the band very well. Chris Funk packs an arsenal of exotic instruments, brandishing his bouzouki, hurdy-gurdy, and dulcimer like firearms, and Rachel Blumberg, in her farewell performance (she has left to concentrate on her band Norfolk and Western) proves a capable foil for Meloy, her voice blending nicely with his on From My One True Love (Lost at Sea) and The Mariners Revenge Song. She also adds thunderous momentum to the opening The Infanta, a heartbreak pulse to the quieter parts of On the Bus Mall, and an athletic shuffle to The Sporting Life, and her hi-hat decorates We Both Go Down Together like jewels on a lovers necklace. He remains enamored with tawny historical verisimilitudes, which inform the devastating Eli, the Barrow Boy, The Infanta, and The Mariners Revenge Song (the latter of which, legend has it, was recorded live around a single mic). But much of his chosen subject matter sounds startlingly contemporary, even if these songs still confront the familiar theme of impossible love. Meloys acoustic guitar is delicate here, while the band churns a car-chase momentum climaxing in a nightmarish freakout that sounds like Manchurian Candidate dementia triggered by A Day in the Life. Its not a story, but a protest song that uses a slick horn line and Meloys loosest vocals yet (I distinctly hear a whoo) to tally the mathematics of war-- plus dollars, minus lives. But its the sequencing that allows Meloy to work this aside into the albums larger mission: Following To My Own True Love (Lost at Sea), about futilely awaiting a lovers return, it becomes clear that the narrator could be one of the five military wives left widowed by 14 cannibal kings while 15 pristine moderate liberal minds look on helplessly.
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