The Decemberists play dress up musically in their new album Picaresque, and photographically in the illustrated libretto that accompanies their disc. Singer-songwriters will all be put to shame by the skillful storytelling with which Colin Meloy atmospherically imbues the album. Each of the songs is its own contained narrative, complete with exotic settings, arcane language, and quixotic characters. If these words evoke memories of a required college lit course, you’re on the same page as the Decemberists. But the great thing about the album is whether or not you’re versed in lit vocab, the never pedantic Decemberists spin yarns nice enough for a brand new sweater.
“Eli, The Barrow Boy,” tells the tale of the eternal barrow pusher: like a werewolf, he continues to push the barrow on moonlit nights. Meloy adopts an appropriate ballad-like intonation to describe a life of selling coal and marigolds. Interminable conflicts also plague the variously professionals in “The Engine Driver.” Each tries to rid himself of the memory on an unrequited love who has stayed for much too long. Meloy sing, “I’ve written pages upon pages/Trying to rid you from my bones.” But the refrain continues: “if you don’t love me let me go.” We don’t know if she ever does. The melody, however, won’t easily let you go. We do know of the tender affection that runaways kindle to keep warm under bus stops in “On the Bus Mall.” The song begins, “In matching blue raincoats our shoes were our showboats,” Meloy beckons protection from a raincoat and stages his boyhood on a podium of shoes.
While others have accomplished similar feats (Neutral Milk Hotel, Belle and Sebastian), The Decemberists’ inclusion of an illustrated and carefully posed booklet sets them in a conjured world of their own.
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