The Decemberists

While wandering through a park in my hometown this summer, I came across a confederate civil war re-enactment camp (oddly enough, since I live in Long Island, NY). Twenty or so full-grown men and women were dressed in linens, brandishing bayonets, cooking stew in the ground, and wholeheartedly refusing to admit we now live in the age of iPods and MTV. If they did, be damn sure one of the Decemberists' soldier songs would be blasting out from the flaps of their tents.

The Crane Wife is old school done modern. For a present day rock band to base an album around a Japanese tale of a crane becoming of woman would seem ridiculous enough -- then they throw in a 12-minute epic about a sailor's journey and some civil war era character sketches. But this is the Decemberists, who've built a critically acclaimed career off singer Colin Meloy's epically verbose historical tales. And this new batch is lighter on SAT verbal and higher in instrumentation, giving their song about kidnapping a landlord's daughter at gunpoint -- one of the album's best -- its well deserved mass appeal.

The Decemberists wrap their stories -- deceptively full of sordid themes like murder, rape, and other disgraceful behaviors -- in airy packages of jangly acoustic-electric guitars, light percussion, and a few oddball instruments like Wurlitzer and bouzouki. Each song channels the gritty underbelly of civilizations past. If my history classes had been anywhere near this entertaining, I wouldn't have slept through most of them. And you shouldn't sleep on this album. - David Pessah, kNewIt06

Colin Meloy and his brave Decemberists made the unlikely jump to a major label after 2005's excellent Picaresque, a move that surprised both longtime fans and detractors of the band. While it is difficult to imagine the suits at Capitol seeing dollar signs in the eyes of an accordion- and bouzouki-wielding, British folk-inspired collective from Portland, OR, that dresses in period Civil War outfits and has been known to cover Morrissey, it's hard to argue with what the Decemberists have wrought from their bounty. The Crane Wife is loosely based on a Japanese folk tale that concerns a crane, an arrow, a beautiful woman, and a whole lot of clandestine weaving. The record's spirited opener and namesake picks off almost exactly where Picaresque left off, building slowly off a simple folk melody before exploding into some serious Who power chords. This is the first indication that the band itself was ready to take the loosely ornate, reverb-heavy Decemberists sound to a new sonic level, or rather that producers Tucker Martine and Chris Walla were. On first listen, the tight, dry, and compressed production style sounds more like Queens of the Stone Age than Fairport Convention, but as The Crane Wife develops over its 60-plus minutes, a bigger picture appears. Meloy, who along with Destroyer's Dan Bejar has mastered the art of the North American English accent, has given himself over to early-'70s progressive rock with gleeful abandon, and while many of the tracks pale in comparison to those on Picaresque, the ones that succeed do so in the grandest of fashions. Fans of the group's Tain EP will find themselves drawn to "Island: Come and See/The Landlord's Daughter/You'll Not Feel the Drowning" and "The Crane Wife, Pts. 1 & 2," both of which are well over ten minutes long and feature some truly inspired moments that echo everyone from the Waterboys and R.E.M. to Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, while those who embrace the band's poppier side will flock around the winsome "Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)," which relies heavily on the breathy delivery of Seattle singer/songwriter and part-time Decemberist Laura Veirs. Some cuts, like the English murder ballad "Shankill Butchers" and "Summersong" (the latter eerily reminiscent of Edie Brickell's "What I Am"), sound like outtakes from previous records, but by the time the listener arrives at the Donovan-esque (in a good way) closer, "Sons & Daughters," the less tasty bits of The Crane Wife seem a wee bit sweeter. ~ James Christopher Monger, All Music Guide