{"id":1807,"date":"2011-03-18T10:49:17","date_gmt":"2011-03-18T17:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=1807"},"modified":"2011-03-18T10:49:17","modified_gmt":"2011-03-18T17:49:17","slug":"the-decemberists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2011\/03\/the-decemberists\/","title":{"rendered":"THE DECEMBERISTS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>T<\/strong>HE <\/strong>DECEMBERISTS<\/strong><\/p>\n

The King Is Dead<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

[Capitol]<\/p>\n

Decemberists leader Colin Meloy has a flair for fanciful storytelling\u2014but because America is too young to have produced its own ancient folklore, he and his cohorts tend to look elsewhere for inspiration. On its last two albums the band drew on Japanese and European traditions, creating elaborate fairy-tale song cycles. On first listen, The King Is Dead<\/em> seems the opposite: a collection of scaled-back Americana tunes with no unifying storyline. The songs are short and straightforward, Meloy\u2019s penchant for $50 vocabulary words notwithstanding.<\/p>\n

In its own way, though, the Decemberists\u2019 latest is a concept album\u2014one about the American character. The country ballad \u201cRise to Me\u201d and granite-miner singalong \u201cRox in the Box\u201d are testaments to individualism and self-sufficiency, ideas Meloy\u2019s narrators seem ready to die for. A similar ruggedness informs the post-apocalyptic fantasy \u201cCalamity Song,\u201d one of several tracks featuring R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck. The tune, powered by Buck\u2019s signature 12-string, is about rising from the ruins and rebuilding society from scratch\u2014it\u2019s the end of the world as we know it, and Meloy feels fine.<\/p>\n

But America isn\u2019t just for the hard and solitary. On \u201cDon\u2019t Carry It All,\u201d a number reminiscent of Tom Petty\u2019s \u201cYou Don\u2019t Know How It Feels,\u201d Meloy and guest vocalist Gillian Welch sing of community pride and farmers helping farmers. On \u201cJune Hymn,\u201d the group celebrates the majesty of unpaved landscape. The country Meloy presents is beautiful and ugly, warlike and compassionate. As this fine album attests, it\u2019s as worthy of mythologizing as anyplace else. \u2013Kenneth Partridge<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE DECEMBERISTS The King Is Dead [Capitol] Decemberists leader Colin Meloy has a flair for fanciful storytelling\u2014but because America is too young to have produced its own ancient folklore, he and his cohorts tend to look elsewhere for inspiration. On its last two albums the band drew on Japanese and European traditions, creating elaborate fairy-tale […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[196,514,1334,1332,1333],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1807"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1809,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807\/revisions\/1809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}