A Neil Young/Tom Petty solo harmonica whines as the opening song twinges and thumps on “The King is Dead,” possibly tricking listeners into believing they’re playing the wrong artist. As Colin Meloy’s voice grabs the listener’s ears back to the present, it’s clear that this can be no one else but The Decemberists.
Yet the comfortable demeanor of Meloy and lighthearted attitude of the majority of the album expresses that this isn’t exactly the same Decemberists of the last decade.
The band’s previous two albums, “The Hazards of Love” and “The Crane Wife,” were ambitiously large conceptual albums that challenged its listeners. Appearing to seek a departure from such grandiose musical feats of two-part songs and 12-minute ballads, the band’s sixth studio album is a simpler and trimmer version of the Portland band’s signature foundational sound.
Neatly packed into 10 songs, “The King is Dead” is a little over 40 minutes of twangy backwoods melodies that favor a short and simple aesthetic. Although the album plays to similar themes of heartbreak, loss and adventure as seen on previous albums, the group appears to be asking its listeners to relax on a summer day — or more appropriately, a rainy afternoon — rather than contemplate the deeper meanings of life.
Such an attitude could be attributed to the state of mind the band had during the recording sessions of the album.
Recorded in the spring of 2010, the band created most of the tracks over a six-week period in a barn on the eight-acre site of Pendarvis Farm, just outside of Portland. The farm’s influence is felt with the tree-lined album cover paralleled with the rustic sounds heard from start to finish. In the folksy “January Hymn,” the barn door view staring out into a sun-filled Northwest forest is easily imaginable.
Although cheery and light, the album works as an attempt at finding a middle ground. Where “The Hazards of Love” polarized listeners, “The King is Dead” will do nothing of the sort. It’s too simplistic to make anyone hate the album. The unchallenging sounds also mean that the degree of admiration probably won’t be found either.
Better put is that The Decemberists bring less. The emphasis that they restrained their sound is evident throughout the album.
This works for the band in as good of a way that it does bad. Its most powerful tracks, “Calamity Song,” and “June Hymn,” subtly display the band’s comfort with the unique sound that brought them instant success with its 2006 album “The Crane Wife”; its sound will always being something interesting, even when it isn’t thrown out with as much effort.
The weaker aspect of the simpler approach to “The King is Dead” is that the easy listening of acoustic guitars and folksy harmonicas begins to get old. The opening track, “Don’t Carry it All,” starts too similarly to “Down by the Water.” Around “Rox in the Box,” the looming suspicion that you’ve heard this song somewhere before begins to set in. By the time “Dead Avery,” the closing track on the album, plays, it’s evident why the album is a little over 40 minutes in length; anything more would doom the album into overkill.
Though teetering on departing into a monotonous sound, The Decemberists are able to hold together “The King is Dead.” Much of this comes from the band’s interesting sound and not the actual content or song construction. This aspect may result in people believing The Decemberists could have done more with the album, pushing toward a richer, fuller and inspiring sound rather than a lighter one.
Of course none of this may really matter to The Decemberists themselves, who may have just wanted to find a sound that complemented a spring day on a farm surrounded by the richness of the Northwest forests.
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