PICARESQUE

Product Description The Decemberists know that the psychology of a culture at war is complex; that historical archetypes can inform the masses on current events far better than the evening news; and, perhaps most importantly, that life is ultimately a spectacular and colorful pageant. They remind US that, on any given day, we might rub shoulders with rogue spies and runaway prostitutes, child monarchs and vengeful mariners, boy ghosts, couples contemplating suicide, cannibals and drowning angels. This existence is indeed a spectacle to be revered. In August of 2004, Rachel Blumberg, Jenny Conlee, Chris Funk, Colin Meloy, and Nate Query set up shop at a former Baptist church in Portland, Oregon. With co-producer Chris Walla at the controls, the five musicians collectively known as the Decemberists emerged three weeks later with the bulk of the work completed for Picaresque (Kill Rock Stars - March 22, 2005), their most ambitious and realized effort to date. Review Re-sleeve that album cover! Disregard those silly liner-note photographs! Never you mind the Decemberists' attempts at theatricality-- Picaresque is the band's least stagy, most serious, and most accomplished effort yet. It's also as good a follow-up to Her Majesty the Decemberists any devoted fan could hope for. On that previous effort, head insurgent Colin Meloy proclaimed, ''I was meant for the stage,'' and indeed the songs sounded like production numbers performed by eager actors in a cramped playhouse. That album still retains its considerable charm, but the Decemberists sounded less like a band than a traveling troupe at the behest of fickle royalty.Picaresque easily dispels such limitations. Here, as he plaintively proclaims on ''The Engine Driver'', Meloy is ''a writer, a writer of fictions.'' As its title suggests, the album collects a compendium's worth of well-crafted story-songs, most of which sound more literary than theatrical (the nearly nine-minute ''Mariner's Revenge Song'' excepted). In other words, the Decemberists are no longer the indie rock version of the Max Fischer Players; these songs are content to be songs, not one-acts, and the music is music, not sonic scenery. As a result, Picaresque sounds similar to Castaways and Cutouts and their live shows: The music is more dynamic and all the more evocative for not attempting to romantically conjure the past and filter it through Meloy's imagination. Despite some historical backdrops, most of these narratives are set in the here and now, a milieu that suits the band very well...In developing into such a formidable flock, the Decemberists not only have far outstripped those ridiculous comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel that dogged Her Majesty, but have also allowed Meloy to widen his lyrical scope and hone his ambitious narratives. He remains enamored with tawny historical verisimilitudes, which inform the devastating ''Eli, the Barrow Boy'', ''The Infanta'', and The Mariner's Revenge Song'' (the latter of which, legend has it, was recorded live around a single mic). But much of his chosen subject matter sounds startlingly contemporary, even if these songs still confront the familiar theme of impossible love...Perhaps the best song he's written, ''On the Bus Mall'' is Meloy's own private Idaho full of boy gigolos amok in the city, and he evocatively contrasts their innocent affection (''Here in our hovel we fused like a family'') with the grittiness of their lives: ''You learned quick to make a fast buck/ In bathrooms and barrooms, on dumpsters and heirlooms/ We bit our tongues/ Sucked our lips into our lungs 'til we were falling/ Such was our calling.''The one standout, the apple among the oranges, is ''16 Military Wives'', which on first listen doesn't seem to fit the Picaresque aesthetic. It's not a story, but a protest song that uses a slick horn line and Meloy's loosest vocals yet (I distinctly hear a ''whoo!'') to tally the mathematics of war-- plus dollars, minus lives. But it's the sequencing that allows Meloy to work this aside into the album's larger mission: Following ''To My Own True Love (Lost at Sea)'', about futilely awaiting a lover's return, it becomes clear that the narrator could be one of the ''five military wives'' left widowed by ''14 cannibal kings'' while ''15 pristine moderate liberal minds'' look on helplessly. This is a new side of the Decemberists: angry, impassioned, and more in touch with the world than ever. --PitchforkPicaresque is the consummate Decemberists album title: It means ''pertaining to rogues or rascals,'' a propensity of Colin Meloy's loquacious, theatrical pop narratives (see the nine-minute klezmer epic ''The Mariner's Revenge Song'' for a sterling example). More specifically, it refers to a fiction of Spanish origin with a rakish anti-hero as its protagonist. It also sums up Meloy's favorite songwriting devices arcane language, idiosyncratic narrative fiction, archetypal characters, and the exotic whiff of foreign lands and bygone eras in one deft musical stroke.The Decemberists' first two records Castaways and Cutouts and Her Majesty (both in 2003) felt a touch spotty. The same mania for colorful fictive detail that made them unique inadvertently skewed toward the overly precious. At times you could imagine a certain lyric being used not because it suited the song, but simply because it rhymed with ''joie de vivre.'' Picaresque trumps them both by dint of its focus, consistency and restraint. Meloy's melodies no longer meander; they unspool in taut lines, and his lyrical borders are more tightly cropped than ever before. ''We Both Go Down Together'' subtly echoes R.E.M. s ''The One I Love,'' memorializing the suicide of two lovers separated by a class divide in suitably grand, bittersweet tones. One infinitely hummable tune, ''The Engine Driver'' cycles its perspective between various emotionally captive narrators, while Meloy's most winsome melodic phrasing graces ''At the Bus Mall,'' a tale of runaway prostitutes.Meloy's songs once depicted an international history of stevedores and legionnaires without much rhyme or reason, but on Picaresque he zeroes in on characters usually those struggling in the throes of concealed, unrequited or otherwise ill-fated love before shifting his focus to setting. ''The Infanta,'' all galloping guitars and pounding drums, contrasts the ornate coronation of a Portuguese princess with the placid simplicity of her dreams. The quiet lament ''Eli, the Barrow Boy'' relates the tale of a heartbroken ghost Sisyphus in corduroy pushing his barrow in eternal penance. Meloy even ventures into an American present as outlandish as his imagined past. ''The Sporting Life'' which interleaves a swinging, jaunty beat with swelling organ flourishes relates the humiliation of an injured soccer player who fails to fulfill his father s athletic aspirations, and the shimmering, upbeat stomp of ''Sixteen Military Wives'' conflates the American invasion of Iraq with the Academy Awards ceremony in what is for the antiquarian Decemberists an unusually timely statement.Meloy's appropriation of antique yarns shares some aesthetic space with oft-cited influence Neutral Milk Hotel, but his affinity with the reedy yowl and meticulously sculpted songs of John Vanderslice is more striking. Vanderslice claims fiction writer Steven Millhauser as a guiding influence for his concept records about child prodigies and other gifted pariahs. And Millhauser's predilection for quaint characters and highly specific period pieces as well as his knack for locating the seam where sweetness and darkness dovetail resonates through The Decemberists' songs even more than Vanderslice's.As The Decemberists hone their musical prose, they re upping the bar for ''literate'' songcraft: It's no longer sufficient to leaf through Kafka in the aisle at Barnes & Noble; to keep apace with Meloy, you can start by enrolling in a post-graduate lit course. At an Ivy League university of your choice. --Paste MagazineThe Decemberists somehow just get better and better with every release. From 5 Songs to Castaways and Cutouts to Her Majesty, each record trumps the last one in terms of quality, scope, and praise. So when it came time to release their third full-length, Colin Meloy and company did exactly what everyone thought they'd do: released their best and most ambitious album to date.Picaresque starts off with a bang, sending ''The Infanta'' running out of the gates with its fist in the air and a sneer on its face. Hot in its heels is ''We Both Go Down Together,'' creating a one-two punch that knocks you out with two of the best songs The Decemberists have ever written. From here it's hard to imagine the record going anywhere but downhill, but Meloy and his lovable band of minstrels prove they can go the distance with songs like ''The Sporting Life,'' ''The Engine Driver,'' and ''Of Angles and Angles.''With Picaresque, Meloy proves once again that he is one of modern music's best lyricists. The subject matter on Picaresque spans from the daughter of a Spanish king (''The Infanta'') to maybe the best song about joint suicide ever written (''We Both Go Down Together'') to international espionage (''The Bagman's Gambit''). When ''The Mariner's Revenge Song,'' a sordid tale of, well, revenge, starts off, you don't expect it to last almost nine minutes; and when it's finished, it ranks as the most epic song The Decemberists have done yet. And that's saying something for a band that has tackled everything from prostitutes to soldiers.Musically, The Decemberists take their sound to the next logical step by adding even more instruments than on previous releases. But rather than cluttering the music, it actually works out well. Really well. Petra Haden's violin is brought to the fore on ''We Both Go Down Together'' and carries the weight of its dark melody, and the backing horn section on the bizarre ''Sixteen Military Wives'' is fit for a soul king.After every record The Decemberists release, I find myself wondering where they could possibly go from here, and Picaresque is no different. It's hard to imagine The Decemberists topping such a fantastic and ambitious record, but as their previous albums show, I'm sure they'll have no problem one-upping themselves again. --Tiny Mix Tapes