THE DECEMBERISTS Double Live Gonzo

Double trouble: The Decemberists drop a two-CD live set

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: April 10, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/apr/10/double-trouble-decemberists-drop-definitive-two-cd-ar-1833098/

The Decemberists, We All Raise Our Voices to the Air (Live songs 04.11-08.11) (Capitol)

LIVE WIRED: The Decemberists deliver a concert keepsake

Kiss' Alive! (1975); Neil Young's Live Rust (1979); Rush's Exit. . . Stage Left (1981). Those are just three of the monolithic live double albums that had an immeasurable impact on me during my impressionable formative years. Two slabs of black vinyl packed neatly into an extra thick — double-wide, if you will — fold-out jacket that promised and delivered the next best thing to actually having been there, from the roar of screaming crowds (preferably not dubbed in post-production), to the nearly palpable exultation of the pro-forma extended guitar and drum solos, to the swaggering stage banter. . . those discs offered something akin to a genuine window into the seductive, even mythical realm of the Rock Concert.

       And there were more. As my record collection grew, and my musical vistas broadened, I submersed myself in Zeppelin's monolithic The Song Remains the Same (does anybody remember the hilarious "Stairway To Heaven" ad-lib "does anybody remember laughter"?), found myself wishing that the Who had been kind enough to add a second disc to Live at Leeds (which they finally did on the 2001 deluxe reissue), and marveling at the strange glam-era visage of Lou Reed that adorns the cover of Rock 'n' Roll Animal, an album that, in due course, led me back to discover 1979 Velvet Underground Live with Lou Reed, and finally Reed's hilarious and, at times, disturbing 1978 train wreck Live: Take No Prisoners, which, to this day, contains some of my favorite unintentional comedy routines. Oh, and let's not forget Ted Nugent's way over the top, not so cleverly self-referential Double Live Gonzo, if only because it's fun to say out loud and it pre-dates the Nuge's emergence as a right-wing wing-nut.

       My nostalgia for the double-wide, double-live experience has remained largely unabated over the years. As recently as 2000, for example, I took the time over the course of a single weekend to listen to all 25 of Pearl Jam's "Official Bootleg" series, which amounted to 50 discs in total. And I don't think I flinched once. So, if there's a target demo for We All Raise Our Voices to the Air (Live songs 04.11-08.11), a two-disc, 20-track live collection drawn from eleven shows the Decemberists' performed in the wake of their big commercial breakthrough (2011's The King Is Dead), then I guess I'm it.

       And yet, until a recent drive to Richmond, I was finding it surprisingly difficult to drum up the necessary enthusiasm to work my way through the entire set. The first disc starts out promisingly enough: frontman Colin Meloy, the band's bespectacled, well-read frontman, assures a crowd in Oregon that, "This is not the Keith Urban concert. . . if you mean to be at a Keith Urban concert you will be sorely disappointed" — just the kind of bemused, off-the-cuff banter you want from a good live album.

       And, this is a good live album. Very good, in fact. The band delivers the necessary King Is Dead hits ("Calamity Song," "Down By the Water," "This Is Why We Fight") with rousing aplomb. They offer up the requisite deep cuts, dating all the way back to "Leslie Ann Levine," an acoustic lament from their 2002 indie debut Castaways and Cutouts. And they indulge in their own brand of the extended jam, powering gracefully through all 16:09 minutes of "The Crane's Wife 1, 2, 3," an epic story with a suitably obscure narrative that ebbs and flows and then ebbs and flows some more.

       The problem is, by the time We All Raise Our Voices arrived, I’d already seen, streamed or in some way digitally accessed, various iterations of the material on the album, including the part where Meloy sheepishly introduces “Dracula’s Daughter” as “the worst song I’ve ever written in my life.” I even bookmarked YouTube clips from the tour that I found particularly amusing and/or compelling. Which begs the question, is there really a place for the live album, much less the double-live set, in the Internet age?

       I’m sure there’s no easy answer. But, the well-defined rationales behind the double-live have largely vanished. For the record label, it was once a rather cheap, if somewhat extravagantly packaged way to strike while the iron was hot by quickly bringing new product to market on the heels of a successful studio album/tour. It also bought time for the artist to unwind, recover, and begin work on the next album. And, fans got a raw, unvarnished keepsake to tide them over until the next big release and tour.

Sadly, very little of that applies anymore. So, until someone comes up with a new business model for the double-wide, it just may be on its way to being a thing of the past — a past that Colin Meloy, for one, apparently shares a certain nostalgia for. . .  

THE DECEMBERISTS LIVE 8/3/11 CHARLOTTESVILLE

The Decemberists enjoy a hot night in Charlottesville

By Burg Staff on Aug. 11, 2011
BY MATT ASHARE

The Decemberists; August 3, 2011; nTelos Wireless Pavilion, Charlottesville, VA

HOT SHOTS: The Decemberists sweat it out in Charlottesville

“You look hot,“ singer/guitarist Colin Meloy jokingly taunted the sweaty masses gathered to see his Portland, Oregon-based the Decemberists at Charlottesville’s outdoor nTelos Wireless Pavilion on the steamy evening of Aug. 3. “And you look pretty attractive too,“ the black-suited, bearded and bespectacled Meloy added cheekily, looking rather fine himself if he’d been a professor at a wine-and-cheese mixer and not the front man of a band riding a wave of near universal acclaim in what amounts to one of the bigger success stories of 2011.
     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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