The Decemberists' The King is Dead opens with a bang - a clash of symbols as Colin Meloy blows on the harmonica as hard as he can. It's a fitting introduction, and a statement of purpose. Unlike The Hazards of Love (which was awful, let's be honest) which began with airy singing and possibly a harmonium, this latest album wants to throw you right into it, and succeeds. Meloy's songwriting is as catchy and strong as ever, and the one-two punch of the opener Don't Carry it All and the second number, Calamity Song, remind us of why we all bought The Crane Wife in the first place. The Decemberists know rousing, jaunty numbers, and this is an album full of them, which in the end is a weakness as much as a strength.
The King is Dead is a good album, certainly - there's only one turkey in the bunch, but I'll get to that - but, as the Slate review rightly notes, it is the work of a chastened artist. No one liked The Hazards of Love, and even fewer people bought it. A return to one's roots is not always a retreat, but along with this step back comes a loss of adventure that marked their previous albums. The King is Dead in the end sounds like a collection of tracks that appeared on their earlier albums - July, July! and Yankee Bayonet for example. While July, July! came out as a unique sound in the midst of Castaways and Cutouts, here every song kind of sounds like every other one. What made their early forays into country so interesting is that those forays brushed up against prog experiments or sea shanties. This is what I mean by a loss of adventure - on their first four albums one was never quite sure what style or story they'd tackle next. Here it's the same tale, over and over. It's a good tale, true, but makes you wish they'd thrown in something like When the War Came into the middle of their proceedings.
Maybe they try to with the truly horrible Why We Fight. It's the most straight-shooting rock song on the album, but the lyrics are banal (something out of character and deadly for Meloy), and the whole thing kind of sounds like a Dave Mathews Band song. It almost obscures the two beautiful tracks that sandwich it, June Hymn and Dear Avery. But perhaps this is them being true to form as well, their first three albums all had one or two songs that should have become b-sides. While the album is certainly an enjoyable listen, here's hoping that their number one slot on the billboard charts makes The Decemberists stretch their legs a little bit on their next outing.
Grade: B
Speaking of stretching legs, The Decemberists could take a lesson or two from Sam Beam. The man has consistently expanded his sonic pallet from album to album, seemingly never looking back. Kiss Each Other Clean is another step in that opening up, and while it doesn't have the immediacy of Iron & Wine's previous album, The Shepherd's Dog, it has some of the best songs of his career.
I've already said enough about the opening track and lead single, Walking Far From Home (you can read my post about it here), but suffice it to say that in the opening five minutes Beam takes his place among American songwriters. The opening is transcendent and beautiful, which does make the next song a bit of a let down. At first Me and Lazarus doesn't come across as that impressive - especially considering that Nick Cave beat Beam to the punch a number of years ago - but the song does very well on repeated listening, becoming a funky consideration of death and life unfulfilled. Tree By the River, the next single from the album, is a kind of poppy version of Sixteen, Maybe Less from Beam's collaboration with Calexico. The sentiment is the same, but it's much more fun to sing along with this version of the story.
Maybe the best song on the album, though, is its centerpiece, Rabbit Will Run, a morality tale told by an unrepentant sinner with an ambiguous crime. The music surrounding Beam's alternately clean then effected voice is genuine creepy, moving from fuzzing synth to atonal fluting, all keeping the maniacal voice of the narrator rushing forward. Consider Rabbit Will Run something like Upward Over the Mountain turned on its head, with the singing not pining for the lost love of his mother and regretful of the wrongs he's done, but reveling in his misdeeds and contending that he has "furthered the world in his way." It's a haunting piece, and one that shows how strong a storyteller Beam is. There seems to me to be a lack of respect for songwriters who can inhabit the voices and minds of others - something we deeply respect in our novelists - and that saddens me. Listening to an Iron and Wine song is not getting into Beam's head, it's exploring a world he has created for us. There's a lack of solipsism here that I think we should be grateful for.
The album's closer, Your Fake Name is Good Enough for Me - which many critics have noted is a kind of counterpoint to Walking Far From Home - once again amps up the jazz and the litany of ambiguous imagery. The song begins with a fast moving flurry of charges and mantras, all culminating in an almost religious repetition of the things we (humans? the characters in the song? who knows) will become, ranging from profound - the hammer and the nail, the wary and the wild - to absurd - an ice cream cone, a disco ball - suggesting that "we" are all things, all masses of contradiction. Like Walking Far From Home, a Whitman-like embodiment of all things becomes apparent in Beam's output.
Kiss Each Other Clean won't sound at first like an Iron & Wine album, and it may take you a spin or two to really engage with the songs, but take your time, it will be worth your while.
Grade: A
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