The Decemberists - Her Majesty The Decemberists 2003, Kill Rock Stars $15.98 amazon.com *****

music review.
Great lyrics of today

By Lester Smiley
Northern Light

At first listen, Decemberists front man Colin Meloy has one of the most annoying, artificial, and to be quite blunt, enraging singing voices of all time. He sounds like a dumb-ass-mid-‘90s-Cali-punk singer ala Billie Joe from Green Day doing a vague, overwrought impression of some generic “English” accent.

But don’t let that put you off, because you’d be missing out on the work of one of the greatest lyricists of this generation.

Colin Meloy and his Decemberists make music that sounds like the Civil War and the conquistadors and pirates. Basically, it’s the sound of a million poorly remembered history lectures and Public Broadcasting Service historical documentaries. Pedal steel guitars, accordions, and a glockenspiel all contribute to the anachronistic musical tool box the Decemberists use to construct a world of general oldness, possessing all the romance of the notion of times gone by without getting bogged down in historical minutia.

Meloy’s lyrical method follows in the footsteps of his contemporary, Stuart Murdoch from Belle & Sebastian, in that his songs often follow the stories of fictional characters or locales in different historical periods, are colored with meticulous detail and employ more or less a traditional narrative structure.

Perhaps the greatest of Meloy’s lyrical triumphs to date is “The Soldiering Life” in which, through some great feat of poetic deftness and honest sentiment, the topic of gay army man love in the midst of WWI trench warfare is rendered not just inoffensive but compelling and moving.

The chorus, summed up with the couplet, “But you, my brother in arms/I’d rather I’d lose my limbs than let you come to harm,” is undeniably truthful and brutally life affirming, more so than anything in 60 years of hetero pop. The fact that Meloy was able to write this song without it coming off as “shocking for shocking’s sake” is admirable, but the fact that he wrote the greatest love song of the last 60 years is truly epic.

Meloy also has a knack for giving an impression of place through his lyrics. In “Los Angeles, I’m Yours,” Meloy perfectly distills the narrator’s profoundly mixed feelings about the city into one haunting pop song. The closing verse goes like this: “O, great calamity/Den of iniquity and tears./How I abhor this place!/Its sweet and bitter taste/Has left me wretched wretching on all fours/Los Angeles I’m yours.” Some dude doesn’t just come up with this kind of stuff out of the blue; this is some good-ass songwriting!

There’s nary a lyrical or musical misstep on the whole of “Her Majesty…” save perhaps the ode to New York, “Song For Myra Goldberg.” The song gets a little too clever for its own good, getting tangled up in word play with none of the melodic ingenuity that redeems some of The Decemberists’ other less-than-brilliant moments.

The Decemberists is a band that comes off as more clever and worldly than any of its ilk. The vocals, which at first seemed intolerable, were quickly revealed to actually be a strong point in a band with more to offer.