Decemberists - The CraneWife

Fri 19th Jan, 2007 in Music Reviews

Straight to the point: I experienced an uneasy tension in my reaction to The Crane Wife, the first major-label release from the Decemberists. I sat somewhere between sheer wonderment at the fullness of their concept and a detached curiosity, as if the music was simply a vessel for verbose lyrical narratives.

So, firstly, the concept: frontman and singer Colin Meloy came across the Japanese fable of the crane wife in a children’s bookshop in the early 2000s and was so haunted by it he decided to craft an entire album around its conceit. Therefore the album ostensibly charts a theatrical arc, meshing Meloy’s tales of love and death with astoundingly diverse musicianship. His lyrical palette spins out from the fable’s ill-fated love into vivid tales of death, murder and doomed romance. The characters in these stories seem to inhabit an antique fantasy of no identifiable era.

Meloy’s highly wrought narratives are carried and conveyed by the eclectic styles his band employs. So, whilst folk-rock is the base, we are given prog-rock underscoring a murder ballad (The Island) and even pepped-up alterna-pop underneath a tragic romance (O Valencia). Such choices seem incongruous, yet after a few listens the mood of the music and that of the lyrics seem to fit perfectly.

The first song is the last – The Crane Wife 3 has the narrator mourning the loss of his wife as a steely guitar scratches out the first verse, before the pounding drums and deep piano lead the track into its melancholic crescendo.

This segues into what has to be the record’s centrepiece: an epic 3-part, 13-minute prog suite The Island. Folk bridges are snapped by straight-out rock spikes as an eery island is introduced on first section Come and See. The song then reaches its peak on The Landlord’s Daughter a stabbingly short rape tale. “I’ll take no gold miss, I’ll take no silver / But I’ll take those sweet lips and thou will deliver” wails Meloy over Pink Floyd-esque prog before the inevitable descent into the terse burial scene of You’ll Not Feel The Drowning.

Yankee Bayonet features indie-folk singer Laura Veirs, who duets with Meloy in a bittersweet dialogue between an unreturned soldier and his pregnant wife. It is in songs such as this that the affecting nature of his lyrics is undeniable: “O my love though our bodies may be parted / though our skin may not touch skin / Look for me with the sun-bright sparrow / I will come on the breath of the wind”.

When The War Came tries desperately for contemporary relevance: “Our trust put in the government / They told their lies as heaven-sent”, although seems stuck in a rustic netherworld of grain and gunpowder. The album’s most disturbing point is certainly Shankill Butchers, a sinister lullaby of bloodthirsty adolescents preying on a town, scored by creepy back-alley guitar and organ.

So why the uneasy tension I mentioned at the start? Simply because Decemberists’ aesthetic, whilst commendable, is all too often closed to emotional investment. It’s difficult to find yourself lost in the songs, not just because reading along with the lyrics is often necessary in order to decipher the stories, but also because it all sounds so tightly-executed, musically and lyrically, and not-from-this-time to lose yourself in it. Sometimes the best music is the kind in which you can bury yourself deep within its fraying seams, not so with the Decemberists.

That is not to say The Crane Wife isn’t engaging; those prepared to submit themselves to it will find that it offers a charmingly cohesive journey into very dark places. Yet I can predict the gratitude will only be of an odd, detached kind.