The Decemberists + Gillian Welch

An iTunes Session from the Decemberists + a new one from Gillian Welch

By The Burg Staff on Jul. 27, 2011
By Matt Ashare

It’s been what you might call an awfully good year for the Decemberists. Back in January, the Portland, Ore.-based group and brainchild of the brainy Colin Meloy saw their sixth studio album, The King Is Dead (Capitol), debut at the top of the Billboard charts — a rather remarkable achievement by a left-of-center band who got their start on the indier-than-thou Kill Rock Stars label and who have never seemed particularly interested in playing by the rules of mainstream pop. Perhaps it didn’t hurt that one of Meloy’s professed musical heroes, R.E.M. guitarist Pete Buck, was kind enough to lend a little of his patented 12-string jangle to the folk-rocker “Calamity Song,” as well as mandolin to the disc’s countrified opener “Don’t Carry It All” and churning electric guitar to the dark, Neil Youngian “Down By the Water.”
And Meloy’s decision to simplify his approach after penning the ambitiously arcane rock opera The Hazards of Love (Capitol) in 2009 was evidently a smart move.
     Meloy and his current cohorts — guitarist Chris Funk, bassist Nate Query, and keyboard/accordion player Jenny Conlee of the newgrass band Black Prairie, plus drummer John Moen and violinist Sarah Watkins — have been mighty busy since January.
Along with playing the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival on a tour that brings them to the nTelos Wireless Pavilion in Charlottesville on Aug. 3, they found time to record an NPR “Tiny Desk Concert,” which ranked The King Is Dead as the year’s best album (so far), over, among others, Radiohead’s King of Limbs. I smell a least a couple of Grammy nominations in the Decemberists’ future.
     In the meantime, the band are gearing up for the imminent release of a downloadable “iTunes Session” recording, featuring eight live-in-the-studio performances of tunes to which they’ve been treating club and festival audiences. Buck’s guitar is barely missed on the opening “Calamity Song”; Meloy pulls off a particularly pretty rendition of the pastoral “June Hymn” from “The King Is Dead”; and he’s at his fiercest and most inspired on the propulsive single “This Is Why We Fight.”
     Elsewhere, Meloy digs into the Decemberists’ past, reaching all the way back to their first EP, 2001’s 5 Songs, for the wistfully folksy “Shiny,” a track that takes full advantage of Funk’s pedal steel embellishments and Conlee’s accordion. For a taste of just how willfully obscure Meloy can be, there’s “Shankill Butchers,” a sorta ye olde English dancehall number from 2006’s “The Crane’s Wife” that details the murderous exploits of a loyalist gang who operated out of Belfast in the 1970s. (Yes, I had to look up that one.) But the real treat here is a countrified cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye,” which prominently features Conlee’s gorgeous background vocals along with a nice violin solo. Here’s to hoping it remains part of the current Decemberists’ set.

FOLK HEROES: Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

It was Americana songstress Gillian Welch whose voice so wonderfully complemented Meloy’s on The King Is Dead. And she’s not having such a bad year, either. For starters, after a long songwriting drought, she just released her first album in eight years, the spare, acoustic, old-timey The Harrow & the Harvest (Acony). And now she and her longtime collaborator, guitarist/producer David Rawlings, are embarking on a U.S. tour that begins July 30 at the Newport Folk Festival, ends Jan. 1 at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, and brings the duo to Virginia for three dates — Aug. 17 at the Jefferson Center in Roanoke, the 18th at the Paramount Theatre in Charlottesville, and the 19th at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens in Richmond.
     The new disc is more or less a return to the austere aesthetic of Welch and Rawlings’ two Grammy-nominated releases, 1996’s aptly titled Revival and 2001’s Time (The Revelator). Intimate, alluring, and often quite dark, The Harrow & the Harvest finds Welch’s spectral voice framed by little more than a pair of strummed and flat-picked guitars, as she hauntingly delivers lovelorn lyrics like “I lost you a while ago/Still I don’t know why/I can’t say your name/Without a crow flying by” (“The Way It Will Be”). It’s very much a genre work that blends elements of Appalachian roots, country, and folk without departing from convention. In a sense, that’s both the disc’s strength and its weakness — and one reason why it would have been cool if Meloy had returned Welch’s favor by dropping in for a cameo or three.
http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_reviews_an_itunes_session_from_the_decemberists_a_new_one_from_g