The Decemberists

Less Is Mercifully More on the Decemberists new Americana Excursion

By Matt Ashare

It’s no secret that Colin Meloy’s really, really smart. As the man with the plan behind the Decemberists, he doesn’t just write songs, he undertakes projects; he composes suites; he embarks on grand schemes like 2009’s The Hazards of Love, an hour-plus 17-track operatic opus inspired by obscure British folk traditionals. Not only did that album employ three guest vocalists — My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark, and My Brightest  Diamond’s Shara Worden — but, out of necessity, its lyric sheet designated which parts were sung by particular characters, including a faery queen and a shape-shifting forest creature. Footnotes wouldn’t have been out of the question.
    Whether the Decemberists new The King Is Dead (Capitol) is an apology of sorts for the overcomplicated overreach of Hazards, or just another genre exercise for the brainy Meloy will, I’m sure, make for great blogger fodder (but not here). For the rest of us, it’s just kinda nice that Meloy’s put his ambitions, if not his pretentions, on hold for ten solid, folksy, and relatively straightforward Americana that mercifully clocks in at just over 40 minutes.
    Painted in broad, rootsy strokes by the full-voiced Meloy and a cast that includes his pals in the progressive bluegrass outfit Black Prairie, as well as Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, The King Is Dead is simply more hookish than bookish — especially when R.E.M.’s Pete Buck steps to the fore with a 12-string guitar riff borrowed from his Reckoning days on “Calamity Song.” Buck’s also behind the propulsive churn of “Down By the Water,” which has Welch playing Emmylou Harris to Meloy’s Graham Parsons (and is almost certainly the first proper single in ages to rhyme “wrong” with “anon”).
    The largely “unplugged” feel of the disc leaves plenty of space for the square-dancing fiddle and accordion flourishes that are Black Prairie’s bread and butter. Sure, Meloy drops a few arcane references (Hetty Green in “Calamity Song”; Leda of Greek mythology in “Down By the Water”), but he’s singing more from the heart than the head here, and blowing some pretty mean harp to boot.