The Decemberists enjoy a hot night in Charlottesville
By Burg Staff on Aug. 11, 2011BY MATT ASHARE
The Decemberists; August 3, 2011; nTelos Wireless Pavilion, Charlottesville, VA
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| HOT SHOTS: The Decemberists sweat it out in Charlottesville |
It’s a rare treat to witness — as many of us did with the Arcade Fire last year — the confident emergence of a band out of the comfort of cult stardom into something much larger and, progressively, harder to define. It can also be unsettling, as Gina Arnold detailed in her 1993 book about the rise of alternative rock, Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana (St. Martin’s Press). It used to be viewed as “selling out.“ Increasingly, though, it appears as if more and more people are simply “buying in” to a broader idea of what a big-time band can look and sound like.
That would certainly apply to the Decemberists, who, after a PSA-style recorded introduction by the mayor of Portland — he encouraged the crowd to close their eyes and imagine they were all in a vast pine-tree forest— hit the stage in exaggeratedly formal attire. Nate Query, who switched between electric and stand-up bass, sported a white button-down shirt and black vest. Multi-instrumentalist Chris Funk, who spent most of the set playing an electric or an acoustic 12-string guitar, topped off his vintage suit ensemble with a handsome porkpie hat. And new addition Sarah Watkins was resplendent in a long, blue-print dress, as she embellished the largely acoustic arrangements with fiddle, keyboards, background harmonies, and, on the more electrified new “This Is Why We Fight,“ harmonica and an nicely distorted guitar lead. (Longtime member Sarah Conlee is on leave from the band battling breast cancer, and Meloy was kind enough to give her a shout out while letting fans know that she’s’ amassed a fine collection of “colorful head scarves.“)
Meloy has always been drawn to folk idioms: swinging sea chanteys like “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” from 2005’s Picaresque; the two-stepping, fiddle-laced c&w of “All Arise” from this year’s The King Is Dead: English dance hall fare like the rollicking “The Chimbley Sweep” from 2003’s Her Majesty the Decemberists. All three tunes made it into the Charlottesville set, which had to be one of the quieter arena-rock shows I can remember seeing in quite some time. Parents danced with their kids amid strollers parked on the upper lawn area, while Meloy encouraged the college-age fans who were his original base to sing along to songs spanning a decade of Decemberists recordings, including the slowly swaying “Oceanside,“ a track from the band’s 2001 debut EP 5 Songs, which they opened the evening with. A playful Meloy, who’s developed a low-key, often self-deprecating manner of commanding a big stage, even reprised a deep cut from the 2008 solo acoustic EP Colin Meloy Sings Live! — “Dracula’s Daughter” — introducing it as “the worst song I’ve ever written.“ And late in the set, he handed the microphone over to drummer John Moen, got behind the kit, and the band launched into a messy, improv blues that ended with Moen writhing on the floor.
Whether those seemingly unguarded moments were staged or not doesn’t entirely matter. The effect was to bring a little off-the-cuff, indie-rock charm along for a ride that has thousands of new fans jumping aboard the Decemberists’ mainstream train. Yes, they powered through the jangling, R.E.M.-ish “Calamity Song,“ the pounding, Neil Youngian “Down By the Water,“ and the charged anthem “This Is Why We Fight” — three tunes from the new album that have helped redefine the Decemberists as a radio-friendly, Grammy-worthy entity. And, yes, all three were, well, to borrow a word from Meloy’s opening joke, “hot.“
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