The Decemberists
7 out of 10 - Enjoyable.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Royal Festival Hall, London, England
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The Royal Festival Hall may seem a bit high-brow for a rock concert venue, but then the Decemberists are a bit high-brow for a rock band. Their hyper-literate indie-rock has the diverse preoccupations of a liberal arts student with an undecided major, drawing from old British films, American Civil War letters, Japanese folklore and a half dozen fields in between. Musically they cull from genres as different as prog-rock, disco, and klezmer. But how does this kitchen-sink approach to music and lyrics translate in a performance on an esteemed British stage? Like everything else about the band, it varies.
When the band is on its game, front man Colin Meloy engages the audience— quite forcefully at times— and the band's theatrics mesh with their music in entertaining and powerful fashion. But then there are times when the band gets swept up in their own bubble of creativity and seem to leave the audience on their own to figure it out. Take for example the bold choice of opening with a 20-minute epic in five parts called "The Tain," which deals with Celtic mythology and incest. No doubt the choice delighted the hardcore fans who had purchased the EP of the same name, but to the casual fans the complex song and the wobbly dancing that accompanied it was off-putting.
After the show's sluggish start, Meloy introduced "The Apology Song," with a long-winded introduction that prompted one fan to scream out "Just play the song!" Meloy obliged, and the band kicked into gear with a string of shorter and more energetic songs from their latest album, "The Crane Wife." "Yankee Bayonet" and the "Crane Wife 1 and 2" were some of the strongest songs of the evening, thanks in part to the impressive backing vocals of Jenny Conlee amplified by the hall's crisp acoustics.
The band seemed a bit baffled by the seated and fairly posh venue. While the sound benefited them, the seating arrangement denied the audience the fluid freedom of movement that give rock concerts a sense of energy. After marveling at the interior design for the first forty minutes, Meloy decided to take matters into his own hands. During "The Perfect Crime" he climbed into the audience and onto the lap of fans, orchestrated a complicated decelerating audience-wide hand wave, and did his best to get people standing up.
The rapport Meloy built up with the audience paid off in a big way during the finale, a raucous yet seemingly endless version of "The Mariner's Revenge Song." With the crowd screaming on cue, the band members mimed death at sea and a lone Meloy sang in the spotlight about the gambler who had ripped off his mother and currently sat with him in the belly of a whale. At that moment, the Royal Festival Hall was as good a venue for the band as any, as the stage of a rock concert was transformed into the platform for an event of participatory theater.
Setlist: The Tain, Apology Song, Yankee Bayonet, Crane Wife 1 and 2, Culling of the Fold, Perfect Crime, O Valencia!, The Island, After the Bombs, Kingdom of Spain, Mariner's Revenge Song
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