The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love
By Nick Manteris · 0 Comments · Leave a Comment
The Decemberists are an indie rock quintet from Portland, Oregon with a name based on a group of unsuccessful Russian revolutionaries. Their folk songs are usually self-contained stories of historical fiction, with soldiers, gypsies, crimes and tales of the sea. This time there is a pregnant maiden, a shape-shifter, a murderer and a forest queen and the entire album tells their fairy tale story. With The Hazards of Love they’ve created a honest-to-goodness rock opera, like Tommy or Quadrophenia from The Who, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust or Pink Floyd’s The Wall. There are elements of progressive rock throughout the album, but maybe, because of their predominant musical style, it would be more apt to call this a “folk opera.”
The three best songs on the album feature each of the different vocalists…Colin Meloy narrates in “A Bower Scene,” Becky Stark is Margaret in “Won't Want for Love (Margaret in the Taiga)” and Shara Worden is the forest queen in “The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid,” a duet with Colin Meloy. Becky Stark is from the band Lavender Diamond and Shara Worden is from My Brightest Diamond. One can only assume that that the band would have written in additional parts for other folk artists…if only they could have located more groups with the word “diamond” in them. “The Rake's Song” is noteworthy for its delightfully morbid subject matter and the secondary usage of the word “rake.” The intro of “Margaret in Captivity” sounds way too much like Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” and the detrimental effect of that should also be mentioned.
- Score
- 67%
Overall though, the folk opera experiment works on The Hazards of Love and The Decemberists reaffirm their status as mythic storytellers and accomplished musicians with an album that rivals the two quite good albums that preceded it.
