The Decemberists

Ambitious is one way to describe The Decemberists’ latest album, The Hazards of Love. Concept albums usually walk a delicate line; they either work or they don’t. There really isn’t much of a middle ground. The album needs to flow as a whole, sharing a constant theme or story, while the sum of its parts also need to stand on their own merits so that they can be taken independently. This is no easy task. The problem with The Hazards of Love is although it works as a whole, the songs don’t fare quite as well when they’re taken out of the greater context of the album.

The Hazards of Love tells the story of William, a forest dweller and his love, Margaret. When Margaret (voiced by Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark) finds out she is carrying William’s child she ventures into the forest, to find him. Their love is threatened when the jealous Forest Queen (voiced by My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden) sends out one of her murderous knaves, The Rake to capture Margaret. William then sets out on a quest to rescue Margaret from the evil Forest Queen. If that description didn’t give it away, lead vocalist Colin Meloy, has said most of the inspiration for The Hazards of Love comes from the British folk revival of the 1960’s. Listening to any of the numbered title tracks scattered throughout the disc the influence isn’t hard to pick up on.

Many of the songs feature folksy acoustic guitars strummed delicately as the story is told in typical singer-songwriter fashion. Although the ‘60s folk-rock sound is constant throughout, The Decemberists also branch out into sludgy, Sabbath-inspired metal as well as loud, Zeppelin-like hard rock with each shift symbolizing a change in mood for the characters or story. The songs also have an operatic quality to them as Meloy shares vocal duties with Worden and Stark along with a host of other guest, each voicing a character. Every song streams seamlessly into the other, many of which feature reoccurring guitar riffs. This works well in creating a continuous, flowing soundtrack for the narrative to unfold but on the other hand the songs sometime seem to bleed into each other and it’s hard to differentiate one track from the other.

If you have an hour to kill and sit down with the entire album, The Hazards of Love will provide you with a mildly entertaining listen and whimsical story to boot. The problem is, unless you’re completely focused on the album itself, the songs tend to get lost on you. Nor can you casually sit down with it and selectively pick some choice tracks as they loose most of their charm once they’re separated from the whole. The Hazards of Love is an ambitious release, there’s no doubt about that, but too much ambition and audacity sometimes leads to contrivance and gimmickry and this is where The Hazards of Love falters.

—Tony Caso
03.31.09

King Decemberist Colin Meloy's love for the heydays of British folk-rock has always served as the foundation on which he builds his crafty, idiosyncratic chamber pop, but on Hazards of Love he's taken that bedrock and built his own version of Stonehenge. A 17-song suite (think one continuous song with track ID's peppered throughout for sanity's sake) about a girl named Margaret, shapeshifters, forest queens, and fairytale treachery, Hazards of Love is ambitious, pretentious, obtuse, often impenetrable, and altogether pretty great. Harking back to the late-60s/early-70s offerings from bands like Pentangle, Horslips, ELP, Steeleye Span, and the Incredible String Band, it makes no apologies for its nerdy, prog rock musicality, and convoluted narrative. Meloy, who often cites Shirley Collins, Nic Jones, and Anne Briggs as influences -- Hazards is named after a Briggs' EP which featured no such song -- must have had a vast hard rock/power metal collection to draw from as well, as one can glean melodic cues and structures from Iron Maiden and Rush as easily as they can Fairport Convention and Jethro Tull. On a record with no obvious single (the first instance of the title track comes the closest), it's the album as a whole that needs to engage, and for the most part, the Decemberists have succeeded. The inclusion of guest vocalists Becky Stark (Lavender Diamond) and Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond), who bring some Little Queen-era Heart to the table, as well as bit parts from Jim James (My Morning Jacket), Rebecca Gates (Spinanes), and Robyn Hitchcock help keep the focus off Meloy's affected vocals, but its the music that drives this beast into the forest. Producer Tucker Martine has beefed up the band's sound even more than he did with Christopher Walla on 2006's Crane Wife, channeling more reverb into the acoustics and a whole lot more brimstone into the electrics, resulting in what is easily the band's best sounding record to date. Hazards of Love won't convert anybody who already wrote the band off as overly precious bookworms with a Morrissey/Victorian ghost story fetish, but fans who have dutifully followed the Decemberists since their 2002 debut get to take home bragging rights this time around. ~ James Christopher Monger, All Music Guide