Pages tagged “the decemberists”

Today is World AIDS Day. Appropriately enough, it's also the day that the line-up was revealed for Dark Was the Night, a compilation release which will benefit AIDS/HIV awareness group, The Red Hot Organization.

Last week, we told you about the Decemberists' new album Hazards of Love and its past life as a would-be musical. We also mentioned that frontman Colin Meloy was "still working with" some producers on "another project” for the stage, and while we didn't expect to hear much else about it for a while, well, we have. 

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In the wake of last week's maddeningly brief announcement that recording had wrapped and mixing commenced on the Decemberists' upcoming fifth release, Paste got in touch with frontman Colin Meloy—not to chat about meat, but to further flesh out some details on the album now known as Hazards of Love. And unless your indie rock crystal ball somehow indicated the band's eventual adoption of British stoner metal as a major sonic touchstone, what we learned might surprise you.

Yep, that's pretty much it. In a band newsletter sent out last night discussing the previously reported Always the Bridesmaid vinyl singles series and subsequent tour dates, The Decemberists left their fans with this sneaky little teaser:

"In other news, we've officially closed the book on tracking our next record and mixing starts tomorrow! We're all tremendously pleased with the outcome thus far. It's called 'Hazards of Love.' That's all we'll say now."

You Ain't No Picasso posted six new Decemberists songs a couple months back, including a couple that seem likely to be included on the new record, "Hazards of Love 1 and 2" and "Hazards of Love 3." Good stuff.

And that's all we'll say now as well. Stay tuned...

Related links:
News: Decemberists prep Bridesmaid vinyl single series
News: Decemberists set for Bridesmaid tour in November
The Decemberists on MySpace

Got a news tip for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

The Decemberists made us very happy in 2006, and the wealth of tour dates that followed certainly didn't hurt. But it had been a quiet 2008 for the band, now at work on a follow-up to The Crane Wife, until we got wind of Always the Bridesmaid: The Singles Series. The series—which, as we reported before, includes an “amorous” nod to Valerie Plame—begins to roll out on Oct. 14, and the band has announced a bundle of new dates to go with it.

"Always the bridesmaid, never the bride." Comfortingly, this little gem of self-pity is finally going to move beyond the clutches of a mouthwash industry preying on the manufactured fears of early 20th-century women (post-feminism at work, people). And who better to carry that torch than The Decemberists, with a series of singles planned for release in the next few months?

Since the advent of the DVR, sports are about the only thing I watch live on TV. So the Olympic Games have reintroduced me to the TV commercial, something I've managed to avoid outside of college football season and the occasional Braves game. And the quality of music has been a pleasant surprise (even a crappy beer like Bud Light—or Bud Light Lime—has the sense to use Santogold). Here are the best songs in commercials running during the Olympic Games:

Colin Meloy of the Decemberists wants his band’s next album to sound like a swamp monster. Or, maybe he didn’t say that, exactly, just that he wanted the pending record to be “mossy” and “evil.” At first, these terms don’t seem to describe the Portland-based group any better than, say, “Indonesian” or “Ska,” but like a blanket of moss in a forest gully, their melodies are lush, and through some of the darker ballads like “Mariner’s Revenge Song,” have frequently spread into nefarious territory.

We like the Decemberists. A lot. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we only like frontman Colin Meloy 20% as much as we like the band as a whole. Paste, after all, has much like to give. And our reserves of affection seems especially appropriate, because both Meloy and the entire band have some upcoming adventures.

The Decemberists are playing four shows in the Pacific Northwest, and there’s nothing like tales of shipwrecks to put your sadness over rain and fog into perspective. As for Meloy himself, he’s about to drop a solo tour CD on April 8, via Kill Rock Stars.

The album is appropriately titled Colin Meloy Sings Live!, and it features 14 songs played by Mr. Decemberist during his 2006 solo tour. It’s an acoustic set that features some between-song conversation, as well as a skull, a ship and a stuffed sheep.

The songs, you ask? Well, Meloy performs many Decemberists numbers (and a song from his first band, Tarkio), as well as snippets of songs by The Smiths, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd and R.E.M. Check out the tracklist below, and check back soon for some Meloy acoustic spring tour dates.

Colin Meloy Sings Live! tracklist:

1. Devil's Elbow
2. We Both Go Down Together
3. Evoking a Campfire Singalong*
4. The Gymnast, High Above the Ground
5. Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect > Dreams
6. Dracula's Daughter
7. Wonder
8. A Brief Introduction to Shirley Collins*
9. Barbara Allen
10. The Engine Driver
11. On the Bus Mall
12. A Skull, a Ship, and a Sheep*
13. California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade > Ask
14. The Bachelor and the Bride
15. A Cautionary Song
16. Red Right Ankle
17. Bandit Queen

* indicates between-song banter

The Decemberists Pacific Northwest tour:

January
22 - Portland, Ore. @ Crystal Ballroom
23 - Portland, Ore. @ Crystal Ballroom
30 - Seattle, Wash. @ Moore Theatre
31 - Seattle, Wash. @ Moore Theatre

Related links:
Decemberists.com
The Decemberists on MySpace
KillRockStars.com

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

We've got it easy. If we get sick, we phone in the sniffles, add a cough for effect and spend the day wondering why "narcolepsy" isn't listed under Benadryl's side effects. But if you're in the midst of a nationwide tour like the Decemberists, you've got a lot of unhappy ticket holders to deal with.

The charmingly rustic quintet was forced to cancel its "The Long and Short of It" tour - a whopping 27 dates - so their unnamed band member can mend. "It saddens us to disappoint our fans," Decemberists.com reports. It saddens us that we can't witness one night of rollicking tunes and another of grandiose, whale-ridden tales, but hey, health is important.

This isn't the first time the Decemberists have played hooky because of illness, as last month they had to cancel the rest of their European tour. The band hasn't made plans to reschedule the dates, so go get those refunds and spend them like it's tax-return day.

Related links:
Decemberists.com
The Decemberists on MySpace
The Decemberists at Paste's ACL Festival After Hours

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

In addition to having the best name for their summer tour, “A Bit of Grass-Stain Does Not a Ruined Pair of Jeans Make,” the Decemberists now have the coolest shows of the summer.

The band has announced that they will make their “orchestral debut” in five cities this summer, with a different symphony orchestra backing them at each date. These gigs will be interspersed between their already announced shows.

Also announced is the band’s European fall tour, “A Great Smiting of Chavs,” beginning in September.

For more, check out where the Decemberists latest, The Crane Wife landed on the Paste Top 100 Albums of 2006. Also, check out what members of the band are up to in their free time.

2007 Decemberists orchestral dates:

July
7 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ Hollywood Bowl (with L.A. Philharmonic, Band of Horses opens)
13 - Atlanta, Ga. @ Chastain Park (with Atlanta Symphony Orchestra)
14 - Columbia, Md. @ Merriweather Post Pavilion (with Baltimore Symphony Orchestra)
15 - Philadelphia, Penn. @ Mann Center (with the Mann Festival Orchestra)
18 - Chicago, Ill. @ Grant Park Music Festival at Pritzker Pavilion (with Grant Park Orchestra) Free show

Other 2007 dates:

April
26 - San Francisco, Calif. @ Warfield Theatre
27 - Las Vegas, Nev. @ House of Blues
28 - Indio, Calif. @ Empire Polo Field, Coachella

May
3 - Eugene, Ore. @ McDonald Theatre
4 - Seattle, Wash. @ Paramount Theater
5 - Bellingham, Wash. @ Western Washington University

June
17 - Manchester, Tenn. @ Bonnaroo Music Festival

July
16 - New York, N.Y. @ Central Park Summer Stage
22 - Portland, Ore. @ Edgefield Winery

September
22 - Amsterdam, Holland @ Paradiso
23 - Cologne, Germany @ Live Music Hall
24 - Frankfurt, Germany @ Batschkapp
25 - Karlsruhe, Germany @ Substage
27 - Vienna, Austria @ The Arena
28 - Munich, Germany @ Muffathalle
29 - Berlin, Germany @ Postbahnhof
30 - Hamburg, Germany @ Grosse Freiheit

October
2 - London, England @ Royal Festival Hall
3 - Cambridge, England @ Junction
5 - Wolverhampton, England @ Wulfren Hall
6 - Bristol, England @ Anson Rooms
7 - Oxford, England @ Zodiac
9 - Dublin, Ireland @ Vicar Street
10 - Liverpool, England @ Academy I
11 - Newcastle, England @ Academy II
12 - Glasgow, Scotland @ Academy
13 - Leeds, England @ Metropolitan University

Related links:
The Decemberists’ site
Coachella Festival’s site
Bonnaroo Festival’s site

The Decemberists may have lost the Countdown To Guitarmageddon to Stephen Colbert, but they aren’t letting one meager defeat at the hands of a faux neo-con TV pundit (or, rather, his shredding minion, Peter Frampton) get them down.

After wrapping up a brief European jaunt in late February, the band will kick off yet another tour of the United States, playing again in support of their fourth LP, The Crane Wife. Released by Capitol Records last October, the album topped a number of music critics’ Best of 2006 lists, including Paste’s.

My Brightest Diamond will support The Decemberists for all dates except April 4th-6th.

Tour stops include:

March:
21 -- Jersey City, NJ, Loews Theater
22 -- Jersey City, NJ, Loews Theater
23 -- Boston, MA, Avalon
24 -- Boston, MA, Avalon
26 -- N. Bethesda, MD, Strathmore Music Center
27 -- Upper Darby, PA, Tower Theater
30 -- Buffalo, NY, Center for the Arts
21 -- Grantham, PA, Messiah College

April:
1 -- Norfolk, VA, The Norva
2 -- Raleigh, NC, Meymendi Concert Hall
4 -- Knoxville, TN, Tennessee Theater
5 -- Nashville, TN, City Hall
6 -- Atlanta, GA, Tabernacle
8 -- Orlando, FL, Hard Rock Live
9 -- Tallahassee, FL, The Moon
10 -- Birmingham, AL, Alabama Theater
11 -- Memphis, TN, New Daisy Theater
13 -- Louisville, KY, Brown Theater
14 -- St. Louis, MO, The Pageant
15 -- Champaign, IL, Foellinger Auditorium/University of Illinois
16 -- Milwaukee, WI, Pabst Theater
18 -- Chicago, IL, Riviera Theater
19 -- Chicago, IL, Riviera Theater
20 -- Madison, WI, Orpheum Theater
21 -- Kansas City, MO, Uptown Theater
22 -- Denver, CO, Fillmore Auditorium
25 -- San Francisco, CA, Warfield Theater
26 -- San Francsico, CA, Warfield Theater

May:
3 -- Eugene, OR, McDonald Theater
4 -- Seattle, WA, Paramount Theater
5 -- Bellingham, WA, Western Washington University

Related Links:
The Decemberists’ official website
Colin Meloy on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross
Paste’s Top 100 Albums of 2006, featuring The Crane Wife at #1
My Brightest Diamond’s official website

The Decemberists will release their Capitol Records debut, The Crane Wife, on Oct. 3 and embark on a North American tour Oct. 17.

Recorded in Portland and co-produced by Chris Walla (Death Cab for Cutie) and Tucker Martine (Laura Veirs), The Crane Wife was inspired by an ancient Japanese folk tale of the same name that Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy discovered years ago in the children’s section of a local bookstore. The disc is comprised of 10 tracks, including the 13-minute ballad, “The Island.”

The Crain Wife track listing:

1. The Crane Wife 3
2. The Island:
Come and See
The Landlord's Daughter
You'll Not Feel the Drowning
3. Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)
4. O Valencia!
5. The Perfect Crime #2
6. When the War Came
7. Shankill Butchers
8. Summersong
9. The Crane Wife 1 & 2
10. Sons and Daughters

For tour dates, click here.

The rumor's been going around indie circles and blogs for weeks, and Colin Meloy has confirmed it: the Decemberists have signed to Capitol Records.

"It just felt like we had tapped out the resources of Kill Rock Stars,” Meloy told trendy indie website Pitchfork. “We could have stayed on that label until the end of time, putting out proper Decemberists records that sold x amount of copies. But there was a general thought after this last tour that the music and the stage show were evolving. We felt like there was an opportunity for something bigger."

It's not time to worry about the mainstream label monster or collaborations with Yellowcard just yet. "The contract that we have with Capitol is peppered with the words 'band approval',” Meloy told Pitchfork. “It's really as good a contract as we could hope for.”

In other Decemberists news, Meloy's girlfriend, artist Carson Ellis, is pregnant with their first future scholar.

Audience participation at indie-rock shows is a touchy subject. Many people refuse to dance on command. Others stare uncomfortably at their Chuck Taylors when asked to sing in unison. Some even avoid eye contact with band members. A non-responsive audience can be a musician’s worst nightmare. That said, soliciting audience participation at a concert requires a delicate balance of grace and determination. Or a giant cardboard cutout of a whale.

At Atlanta’s Tabernacle, The Decemberists—rocking under a banner of vintage-fabric birds—held true to their tradition of theatrical performances of epics and ballads. The setup was customary: acoustic and electric guitars, violin, accordion, keyboard, upright bass and drums. The well-read Colin Meloy’s quirky voice and violinist Petra Haden’s hypnotic background vocals silenced the thick-rimmed specs-and-19th-century-Brit-lit crowd during tracks like “The Bachelor and the Bride” and “Of Angels and Angles.” The hook-laden “Sporting Life” and the sassy “16 Military Wives” had the crowd cheering, singing and spilling their beer all over each other. But it wasn’t until the proper set’s last song, “The Mariner’s Revenge,” that the audience truly participated.

Perhaps it was because earlier Meloy told the audience, “I don’t feel like we’ve appropriately bonded yet.” Or maybe it was that he asked everyone to scream like they were “being swallowed by a giant whale.” In any case, the crowd gave in to a fit of screaming—fists in the air—and nervous little headbangs. The Decemberists left the stage on a high note, hardly pretending they weren’t coming back for an encore.

The band came back with an unexpected, dancey cover of Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky.” It ended the night with a kitschy dying routine that consisted of banging on instruments and falling to the floor, one by one. And for the first time that night, during a heartbreaking performance of “I Was Meant For the Stage,” the lyrics didn’t seem so fictional.

Picaresque is the consummate Decemberists album title: It means “pertaining to rogues or rascals,” a propensity of Colin Meloy’s loquacious, theatrical pop narratives (see the nine-minute klezmer epic “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” for a sterling example). More specifically, it refers to a fiction of Spanish origin with a rakish anti-hero as its protagonist. It also sums up Meloy’s favorite songwriting devices—arcane language, idiosyncratic narrative fiction, archetypal characters, and the exotic whiff of foreign lands and bygone eras—in one deft musical stroke.

The Decemberists’ first two records—Castaways and Cutouts and Her Majesty (both in 2003)—felt a touch spotty. The same mania for colorful fictive detail that made them unique inadvertently skewed toward the overly precious. At times you could imagine a certain lyric being used not because it suited the song, but simply because it rhymed with “joie de vivre.” Picaresque trumps them both by dint of its focus, consistency and restraint. Meloy’s melodies no longer meander; they unspool in taut lines, and his lyrical borders are more tightly cropped than ever before. “We Both Go Down Together” subtly echoes R.E.M.’s “The One I Love,” memorializing the suicide of two lovers separated by a class divide in suitably grand, bittersweet tones. One infinitely hummable tune, “The Engine Driver” cycles its perspective between various emotionally captive narrators, while Meloy’s most winsome melodic phrasing graces “At the Bus Mall,” a tale of runaway prostitutes.

Meloy’s songs once depicted an international history of stevedores and legionnaires without much rhyme or reason, but on Picaresque he zeroes in on characters—usually those struggling in the throes of concealed, unrequited or otherwise ill-fated love—before shifting his focus to setting. “The Infanta,” all galloping guitars and pounding drums, contrasts the ornate coronation of a Portuguese princess with the placid simplicity of her dreams. The quiet lament “Eli, the Barrow Boy” relates the tale of a heartbroken ghost—Sisyphus in corduroy pushing his barrow in eternal penance. Meloy even ventures into an American present as outlandish as his imagined past. “The Sporting Life”—which interleaves a swinging, jaunty beat with swelling organ flourishes—relates the humiliation of an injured soccer player who fails to fulfill his father’s athletic aspirations, and the shimmering, upbeat stomp of “Sixteen Military Wives” conflates the American invasion of Iraq with the Academy Awards ceremony in what is—for the antiquarian Decemberists—an unusually timely statement.

Meloy’s appropriation of antique yarns shares some aesthetic space with oft-cited influence Neutral Milk Hotel, but his affinity with the reedy yowl and meticulously sculpted songs of John Vanderslice is more striking. Vanderslice claims fiction writer Steven Millhauser as a guiding influence for his concept records about child prodigies and other gifted pariahs. And Millhauser’s predilection for quaint characters and highly specific period pieces—as well as his knack for locating the seam where sweetness and darkness dovetail—resonates through The Decemberists’ songs even more than Vanderslice’s.

As The Decemberists hone their musical prose, they’re upping the bar for “literate” songcraft: It’s no longer sufficient to leaf through Kafka in the aisle at Barnes & Noble; to keep apace with Meloy, you can start by enrolling in a post-graduate lit course. At an Ivy League university of your choice.