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Capitol Records
Released: 10/03/06 |
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The Decemberists
Decemberists songwriter and frontman Colin Meloy first came across the story of The Crane Wife several years ago, in the children’s section of a bookstore in Portland. A venerable Japanese folk tale that has been handed down in countless variations and translations through the centuries (as venerable folk tales are wont to do), the deceptively simple story has stayed with Meloy ever since.
“I thought that it would be a great thing to try to put it to some sort of song form, be it a single tune or something longer,” he recalls. “So I struggled with that for years until finally I realized that it just needed more parts and set about building those.”
He had plenty to occupy him in the meantime: the past three years have seen his band, The Decemberists rise to the first rank of the indie music world with a series of bold, beautiful albums, including 2005’s Picaresque and Her Majesty, The Decemberists (2003). On these albums, Meloy’s crafty compositions marry an infallible melodic knack with a venturesome lyrical palette equally suitable for painting fantastical songs full of sea captains, legionnaires, chimney sweeps and seekers of all kinds.
Sometimes the visions are of bleak urban murderers on the prowl in “The Shankhill Butchers”; sometimes the waterlogged mingling of love and death in “Summersong.” And though death, war, greed, and murder enshroud the album’s thematic framework, The Crane Wife is a resounding celebration of life. No matter how dark the words may get, the album’s spirit is buoyed by boundless energy and an expansive musical vocabulary. Styles and influences abound -- shades of Pink Floyd, Yes, and Fairport Convention trade off with more anthemic touchstones like middle-period R.E.M., The Waterboys, and even early U2 -- but the sound of The Decemberists is unique in contemporary pop music.
“There was a real strong sense among the band that we were not going to try to make a record that somebody would typically make for a major label,” Meloy explains. “We didn’t want the fact that we had signed onto a major label change our approach or aesthetic. In some ways, I think it pushed us farther to the left, farther out of the comfortable Decemberists zone.”
The Crane Wife may be many things -- a deconstructed folk tale, an intimate epic, a great new record by an essential American band -- but it could never be called typical.
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