Plumbiferous Media

The Decem­berists are gen­er­ally a unique and wel­come addi­tion to the indie genre. Its cacoph­o­nously large ware­house of var­i­ous instru­ments, unlikely but wel­come in a rock set­ting, often pro­vides for exceed­ingly inter­est­ing sounds, espe­cially since the musi­cians cer­tainly know how to play them well. This expec­ta­tion of great­ness, espe­cially given the band’s last few pro­duc­tions, The Crane Wife, and Always the Brides­maid: A Sin­gles Series, only serves to cast Haz­ards of Love in an even more neg­a­tive light than the one in which it puts itself. Haz­ards of Love is cer­tainly not a strong album, and is, for a vari­ety of rea­sons, quite pos­si­bly the worst Decem­berists pro­duc­tion to date.

The Decem­berists always seems to func­tion best when using mul­ti­ple polyph­o­nous, coun­ter­pun­tal, and har­monic lines, sim­ply because it sounds impres­sive, and the band can actu­ally man­age to pull it off well. One has to won­der then, why many tracks start even to approach a White Stripes-like qual­ity: sim­ple, half-melodic lines, often in uni­son, with very sim­ple drum-beats to back them up; it cer­tainly doesn’t work well (see “Won’t Want for Love (Mar­garet in the Taiga)”). Another inter­est­ingly large mis­step overly preva­lent in The Haz­ards of Love is the overuse of dis­tor­tion effects, espe­cially the buzzing, quite annoy­ing dis­tor­tion of the gui­tar in “The Rake’s Song.” Now, all this is not to say that The Decem­berists ought to stick to com­plex, acoustic partwrit­ing; they’ve pulled off some quite sim­ple music very well in the past. How­ever, on The Haz­ards of Love, tracks that do fol­low the more stan­dard Decem­berists for­mula, such as “The Haz­ards of Love 1 (The Pret­ti­est Whis­tles Won’t Wres­tle the This­tles Undone),” just hap­pen to also be the strongest tracks of the album.

Colin Meloy’s unique vocals haven’t lost any of their appeal on Haz­ards of Love, even if other aspects of the album are sig­nif­i­cantly lack­ing. Meloy tells the con­vo­luted story of Haz­ards as well as could be expected, and his multi-faceted, melodic voice is almost cer­tainly the best part of the album. How­ever, on Haz­ards of Love, The Decem­berists has made the dubi­ous choice to employ two guest singers (Becky Stark of Laven­der Dia­mond and Shara Wor­den of My Bright­est Dia­mond), each of whom plays one of the char­ac­ters in the twisted epic that is Haz­ards of Love.

While Worden’s con­tri­bu­tion in “The Want­ing Comes in Waves/Repaid” and “The Queen’s Rebuke/The Cross­ing” make for well-told pieces of the tale, most of Stark’s appear­ances are frankly irri­tat­ing, most notably “Isn’t It a Lovely Night?” where Stark’s rather sharp voice leaves the track rather unap­peal­ing. But even worse than the guest singers is the inclu­sion of a chil­drens’ choir on “The Haz­ards of Love 3 (Revenge!),” which is utterly musi­cally unwar­ranted and ruins a promis­ing track. Frankly, Haz­ards of Love would have been much bet­ter served with only Meloy’s vocals.

As Haz­ards of Love is first and fore­most a con­cept album, the lyrics are intended to form an epic tale which per­sists through the entire album. While such sto­ry­telling is cer­tainly not new to The Decem­berists, who have proven them­selves adept at car­ry­ing out even the most obscure Victorian-inspired sto­ry­lines, this is their first attempt at such a large, all-encompassing story.

Sadly, it does not come together as well as we might have hoped. The lack of hooks (except, per­haps, for the recur­rent line “the haz­ards of love”) crip­ples the album’s hopes of nota­bil­ity by indi­vid­ual tracks. How­ever, at the same time, and while not single-worthy, tracks such as “The Haz­ards of Love 1 (The Pret­ti­est Whis­tles Won’t Wres­tle the This­tles Undone)” help to weave the tale well. Nonethe­less, weaker tracks such as “Isn’t It a Lovely Night” and “The Haz­ards of Love 3 (Revenge!)” over­whelm those efforts and con­fuse the story. In fact, one of the best tracks in terms of set­ting the mood of the story is “An Inter­lude” which has no lyrics what­so­ever. While the lyrics over­all aren’t quite weak, they cer­tainly don’t match up to the stan­dards of The Decem­berists’ ear­lier albums.

Over­all, The Haz­ards of Love sim­ply does not come together as an album. While some of the exper­i­men­ta­tion found in The Haz­ards of Love does work quite well (the lack of track breaks through­out the album was pulled off very suc­cess­fully), the vast major­ity of the concept-work failed quite mis­er­ably. It was clear that the guest vocal­ists did not know how to fit in with the unique sound of The Decem­berists, and The Decem­berists were unwill­ing or unable to adapt their style to work with the guests. The band mem­bers also do not seem to be any­thing approx­i­mat­ing experts when it comes to dis­tor­tion and other effects, and The Decem­berists has also made some clearly care­less errors, such as tak­ing what was shap­ing up to be one of the few great tracks on the album, and then cut­ting the rest out, choos­ing instead to replace it with a children’s choir accom­pa­nied by an increas­ingly dis­so­nant mess of sound.

While Haz­ards of Love is cer­tainly an inter­est­ing attempt at a con­cept album, it’s not an espe­cially suc­cess­ful attempt. The com­bi­na­tion of a con­vo­luted story, mediocre guest vocal­ists, and the per­plex­ing inclu­sion of an entire chil­drens’ choir leaves us won­der­ing what the ulti­mate goal of Haz­ards of Love actu­ally was - as it cer­tainly doesn’t seem to have been the cre­ation of a coher­ent album. Nev­er­the­less, on Haz­ards, The Decem­berists has man­aged to pro­duce a few good tracks. They’re sim­ply swal­lowed up by the per­plex­ing mess that is the rest of the album.

This post is tagged 40-49, The Decemberists