I think the reason why I have those dreams where I am in high school and it's two-thirds through the semester and I have only been to class once and I know there is a giant assignment due and I haven't done it yet and I wake up in a cold sweat and realize that I must not really have not gone to English class because I am thinking in run-on sentences and that the way I think is the way I am going to write...is because I never completed my assignment to review the Decemberists' The King is Dead.
I come at this album as a fan of the Decemberists, not some dispassionate outsider who sniffs and says things like: "I find them too fanciful" (i.e. Josh). In my early twenties, they represented what indie could be, a genre where intelligent people could write intelligent and witty songs about obscure and historical topics. There were times I would daydream in French class about being in a band that could write about ANYTHING and not be scorned by an audience of jocks, but celebrated by other nerds. (The end of every concert in this imaginary band would be to play The Phony King of England from Robin Hood and have a major ten minute hoedown. If I head that the Decemberists started doing this, I would not be surprised in the least.) I had no faith that such a band could exist because I didn't think there would be enough fans who would want something like this. This is why Picaresque and The Crane are such important albums to me. They are what I always wanted to hear, but never expected could happen. And when they played for something like 100K people in a Portland park during the run up to the 2008 election, it felt like the world had come around and decided to be a better place.
But, I don't like the King is Dead overall. I wish it didn't exist.
Colin Meloy doesn't traffic in American hominess, but in complicated words and complicated worlds. Americana evokes hominess. Too many of the songs are stuck in Meloy trying to shove too many complicated words into a tune that demands homespun plainness (like Don't Carry It All, This is Why We Fight) or trying to be too homespun and sounding completely artificial (Rise to Me, All Arise!, January Hymn, and the dreadful June Hymn).
To me, the successful songs are their attempts to sound like Fables-era REM (Calamity Song) or when they pull off something that sounds that whalers in New Bedford would have played in their bars during their last night in port (the unfortunately-titled Rox in the Box, Down by the Water).
I hate the "hymns" more than anything. The funny thing is that if I had come across January Hymn when the world was stuck in sludge rock in the early 2000s, I would have welcomed lines like "stuffed in strata of clothes" because it would have represented something different. But I am so spoiled now, that I look at that line and say: "He's singing a freaking James Taylor song and larding it up with fancy words." I don't like James Taylor, but if there's something worse than James Taylor, it's trying to sing laid back with fussy lyrics. June Hymn is the nadir of the album. This is one of those songs that works if you think that Colin Meloy has actually been outside in June and reveled in the bursting forth of nature which I just can't believe based on the man's track record. Reading a book inside in June, yes. Lazing outside and being in awe of ivy and the panoply of song? Yeah, that's Mercury Rev's bailiwick.
