As a lifelong resident of Portland, Oregon, I’m as aware of Colin Meloy as I am of the rain outside. In all of that time, though, and for as long as the Decemberists have been rewarding readers everywhere with their short story-worthy pop songs, I’ve never seen him, or them, live.
(OK, maybe once I realized their keyboardist worked at my neighborhood bookstore, but that’s just so much Babylon.)
On the newly released Colin Meloy Sings Live!, an album which is just as its title implies, I’ve finally gotten a taste of the experience, a glimpse at who this pasty, oft-costumed, pop-rock phantom is. He’s a winsome, controlled performer. He has an unusually plaintive falsetto voice. Between songs, he makes jokes about himself and his music. He’s outstanding.
What Meloy does that so many of his contemporaries don’t (or only do now, to keep up with him) is he treats his music as though it comes from the oldest songbook up on Grandma’s shelf. It’s terribly endearing to hear him break down in “Dracula’s Daughter,” a song he proclaims as the worst he’s ever written. He extracts its flaws—and it is an awful song, the kind you’d question his mettle for writing, but it draws the audience’s delight. When he does medleys (of which there are two, superb constructions on the record), he actually fools around, using Fleetwood Mac or The Smiths as coda or bridging songs with pieces of Pink Floyd instrumentation. Sure, dragging out another version of “Ask” or “Dreams” isn’t akin to any real mastery, nor is incorporating the anthem “Fearless” or the oft-ignored R.E.M. song, “Seven Chinese Brothers.” It is interesting, though, and it’s the antithesis to the argument that Colin Meloy and The Decemberists take themselves too seriously to be fun to listen to. They take themselves just seriously enough to know how to provoke a smile from the ratepayers.
The songs on Colin Meloy Sings Live! are culled from a two-week national tour in 2006, from NY and LA, Virginia and Portland, and from other places in between. It has the flaw of being an unnatural performance patched together like the Bob Dylan Rolling Thunder Revue bootleg, though, so the prospect of an authentic concert experience isn’t there. These are highlights. Of course, that might be OK—because they are, indeed, highlights.
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