dusted

Photo by Shervin Lainez

Six years after the band’s last release — a period that hinted at potential permanent hiatus — the Decemberists return with As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again. The album, in short, features the Decemberists doing Decemberists things, but rather than simply being some sort of return to form, the album acts more like a summation. The group has its sea shanty side and its prog-rock side and pretty much any kind of music that can be preceded by “folk-”. Here the band draws on 20 years of breadth for an album that’s both focused by song and sprawling by (double) album, resulting in the group’s finest material since 2006’s The Crane Wife.

The album opens with one of their hookiest songs, “Burial Ground,” which straddles the line between 1960s pop and folk singalong. With James Mercer on backing vocals, the songs takes a playful look at the adolescent urge to hang out in cemeteries. The music mixes the vibrancy of exploration with a darker psychic undercurrent (the death wish here is almost explicit by the song’s finish). The graveyard makes for an appropriate setting, as much of the album considers mortality. Country-rocker “Long White Veil” leaves everything except the emotion out of a story about a bride dying on her wedding day. Monochromatic partner “The Black Maria” slows down and add some menace to the inevitable (the title refers to a police transport van — a paddy wagon — but the metaphorical implications are clear). “William Fitzwilliam” requires some historical unpacking, despite the skateboard, but ghosts haunt the song just as clearly as the lyrical playfulness, as when King Henry VIII’s man is encouraged to not “lose his head.”

The Decemberists fill the album to overflowing with sharp, catchy songs, Colin Meloy’s idiosyncratic bookishness well-turned for emotional resonance without relinquishing energy or wit. The main part of the album ends with the limits of words in “Never Satisfied,” and a character’s struggle to understand that time wasted isn’t wasted “if it’s wasted along the way,” sunrises to be enjoyed along with “no more words for once.” The peaceful ending nevertheless contains tension in a person’s inability to properly enjoy the pause, but it should serve as comfort and guidance to restless listeners.

As if the Decemberists themselves could sit still. The album’s final track, the 20-minute “Joan in the Garden” could be its own ambitious EP. The track has a prologue of sorts, with Meloy himself discovering Joan of Arc and struggling to write about her, even as he decides to “lay her heart in mine.” The band begins building tension immediately, bells signaling a new level of movement. Meloy’s lyrics are both oblique and accessible, matching the larger point he’s making about transcendental experience (or at least its related art). The track goes into a deep static stretch before releasing into an accessible prog style. At this point, the violence – both historical and putative – erupts, blood flowing as both saints and autocrats face terminal danger. “Hosanna, yeah!” Meloy sings, giving a rallying cry to an archetypal complexity. It is, of course, just the Decemberists doing Decemberists things.

Justin Cober-Lake